Postman

Postman is an API platform for developers to design, build, test, and iterate on their APIs. It's an indispensable tool for anyone working with backend services. At its core, Postman allows you to send HTTP requests to any API endpoint and view the response in a clean, organized way. You can specify the request method (GET, POST, etc.), URL, headers, and body with ease, making it much simpler than using command-line tools like cURL for testing. This is incredibly useful during development. As you build your API endpoints, you can use Postman to send test requests and verify that they behave as expected, checking the status code, response body, and headers. Postman's features go far beyond simple requests. You can save your requests into 'collections', which allows you to group related endpoints together (e.g., a 'User Management' collection). Within these collections, you can create 'environments' to manage variables. For example, you can have a local environment with `http://localhost:3000` as the base URL and a production environment with `https://api.example.com`. This allows you to switch between testing environments without changing your requests. Postman also supports automated testing, allowing you to write test scripts in JavaScript that run after a request is completed to validate the response. It can also automatically generate API documentation from your collections, making it a comprehensive tool for the entire API lifecycle.