#stumps

Stumps is a HTTP/s proxy server that's useful when testing web services (eg: REST or SOAP services) as well as traditional browser-based applications. Stumps allows you to quickly create mocks for all your HTTP/s based services using an intuitive record & replay mechanism. This allows you to write meaningful acceptance and performance tests that aren't tightly coupled to your partners' services.

#Background

Some examples of where Cayan makes a web service call to a third party include:

• Sending encrypted card data to Magtek or Idtech in order to decrypt it
• Running a sale/void/refund through Google Wallet, ISIS, Level Up, or any of our other platform partners
• Running a sale/void/refund through FirstData, or any of our other payment processors
• Integrating with the STS gift card solution, or any of our other gift solutions
• Integrating with ACH automated check clearing houses

Stumps allows us to clearly deliniate what the System Under Test is, and allows us to test our products without also testing our partners' services. We cover that in separate integration tests.

Stumps also plays a big role in helping Cayan test our internal services. Our products are built using a Service Oriented Architecture design, all layered atop our Core Payment Gateway. Stumps allows us to introduce mocks in between these SOA hops, so that we can clearly isolate our system under test.

#Motivation

In many circumstances, it is advantageous to be able to test your core offerings without actually hitting third party partners' services (or sometimes, even one of your internal services). This is the case for many reasons:

• Not all of your partners may have test systems or even test accounts.
• Some services won't allow you to reuse data.
• You want to promote and enforce a loose coupling between components.
• You want to clearly delineate what the system under test is.
• Are you testing your code? Are you testing your partner's service? Are you testing them both (integration test)?
• In the first case, you would prefer to use Stumps to emulate a real request/response, rather than actually reaching out to the third party.
• You want to run a performance test.
• You'll seldom want to peg a partner's servers with a stress test. But you still need to know how well your components perform under load.

Importantly, none of this obviates the need for full integration tests with your partners' systems as part of your CI/CD process.

Use cases

At Cayan, we use Stumps create Mocks/Sims/Fakes for our acceptance testing initiatives, such as:

• Card readers: Magensa/Magtek, IDTech, ...
• Platform Partners: LevelUp, Google Wallet, ISIS, ...
• Many of our payment processors (Nashville, Paymentech, Vantiv, ....)

Stumps also plays a role in Cayan's performance testing initiatives, allowing us to run meaningful performance tests without having crushing our partners' platforms.

Features & requirements

• Must be easy to use, and not require any special tooling.
• A layperson should be able to use this with minimum training, using only a web browser,
• Must support SOAP, REST, and HTML/browser-based use cases (eg. in conjunction with selenium or watir).
• Must be standalone (VCR, node-replay, Betamax, and others fail on one or more of the following points):
• Cannot be tightly integrated with any testing framework .
• Cannot be tightly integrated with the system under test.
• Language neutral.
• Must be a pass-through HTTP/HTTPS proxy server.
• Must be able to record & replay HTTP/HTTPS traffic.
• Must be able to return a specific, canned response if certain criteria are met:
• (Certain) HTTP headers must match
• HTTP body must match
• The matching criteria must be fairly flexible:
• You can choose which fields must match (eg: we care about the "Accept" header, but not "Date" header)
• You can use regular expression matches (eg: the "Accept" header must contain "text/html", but we don't care what else is in the accept header)
• You have some simple boolean logic (eg: "The 'Accept' header must not contain 'text/html'")
• Must be able to edit or manually create responses, including returning specific HTTP headers
• Must support SSL
• Must support gzip/deflate compression

#Usage

Please see the Usage Guide and Walk Thru for instructions on how to use Stumps, including a video demo of Stumps in action.

Source code, issues, and feature enhancements

Stumps' source code is hosted on GitHub, along with all of our other Open Source projects. All issues and feature enhancements are being tracked in the Stumps GitHub Issue Tracker.

Competitors

Below are a number of tools playing in a similar space. Many of them are interesting, mature products, but for various reasons, we felt that they weren't fit for our purposes.

• Web Page Replay
• stubby4j and its clones
• Betamax
• Node-replay
• Vcr
• http-impersonator

Downloading / Installation

Currently, Cayan’s Stumps is only available as a source download. If you’d like to provide a MSI package, that'd be very welcome.

#Contributing We love contributions! Please send pull requests our way. All that we ask is that you please include unit tests with all of your pull requests.

#Getting help We also love bug reports & feature requests. You can file bugs and feature requests in our Github Issue Tracker. Please consider including the following information when you file a ticket:

• What version you're using
• What command or code you ran
• What output you saw
• How the problem can be reproduced. A small Visual Studio project zipped up or code snippet that demonstrates or reproduces the issue is always appreciated.

You can also always find help on the Stumps Google Group.