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]]> There was a lot going on in the internet this week! We can expect to see Twitter and Google partner up, but we can expect the opposite for Comcast and Time Warner cable. WordPress adds a security update after the disclosure of a cross-site scripting vulnerability, and Microsoft developers create a tool that guesses your age, which quickly went viral.Twitter and Google partner up to integrate tweets into Google search results
According to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, we can expect to see Twitter content integrated into Google search results sometime this month. A deal was reached between the two giants in February that would allow Google full access to Twitter’s stream of tweets, known as the firehouse. This is a vast change from attempting to crawl through the 500, 000, 000 tweets per day.
Although Costolo did not give a specific date, he did elaborate on the rationale behind the deal saying the “Google deal and relationship is all about driving our total audience strategy. The goal is to get people to consume content and engage with that content whether they log in or not.”
Costolo also announced that Twitter is working with Apple to integrate its content directly into Apple’s Spotlight search on both iOS and OS X. According to Buzzfeed, it’s already being introduced.
WordPress issues a critical security update to address zero day exploit
WordPress 4.2.1 was made available Monday containing a critical security release to address a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability. The XSS vulnerability could have easily been exposed through seemingly benign WordPress comments that could be triggered when viewed by injected JavaScript, allowing unauthenticated attackers to take control of entire websites. Jouko Pynnonen, a Finnish information security expert, discovered the threat in November of last year but said WordPress “refused all communication attempts” about the security vulnerabilities. Due to the lack of response, Pynnonen disclosed the threat and urged administrators to disable all comments. Thankfully, WordPress’s release was made available a day after his post.
Comcast and Time Warner terminate merger agreement
The Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, the largest cable merger ever proposed between the two largest cable companies, has been cancelled.
On April 24th, Comcast announced that the $45 billion merger agreement had been terminated. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts made an optimistic statement, saying “Today, we move on. Of course, we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities, but we structured this deal so that if the government didn’t agree, we could walk away.” The announcement came after about a year of regulatory review from the US. Congress, the FCC and the Department of Justice. The majority of the American public viewed the merger as negative and believed it would lead to an increase in internet costs for everyone. Netflix’s CEO’s main goal was to stop the merger and “to get the government to block the Comcast-Time Warner merger.” The mega deal would have given the single cable company control over more than half the country’s internet users.
Microsoft’s new How-old.net site goes viral
Microsoft launched a new webpage using Microsoft’s recently released Face detection API’s called how-old.net. The site allows users to upload images to be analyzed and guess the age and gender of the any recognizable faces in the picture. To the surprise of the developers hoping for 50 people to try it, the tool quickly went viral entertaining 35,000 users worldwide within hours. The tool focuses on three things:
Extracting the gender and age of the people in these pictures.
Obtaining real time insights on the data extracted above.
Using a real time dashboard to view the above results.
The tool was put together by a couple of developers within a day, demonstrating the capability of Azure services and the Machine Learning APIs. To try out the site yourself, go check out http://how-old.net (#HowOldRobot) and check out some of the funny inaccuracies.
In other news:
Google person finder deployed to assist earthquake victims
http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/telecom/internet/finding-people-in-the-earthquake-zone
Facebook graph api changes go live
http://developers.facebook.com/blog/
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]]> Mobile friendliness algorithm update went global this weekGoogle began globally rolling out their mobile search algorithm update to include mobile-friendly websites as a ranking signal. The updated search algorithm improves search result rankings for web pages that are optimized for mobile traffic, and should impact more sites than Google’s Panda and Penguin updates.
Google has reported that since two months ago, there are 4.7% more mobile-friendly sites relative to the whole. This is great news, as by 2020, 90 percent of the world’s population over 6 years old will have a mobile phone, and smartphone subscriptions are expected to top 6.1 billion.
Target website overwhelmed during Lilly Pulitzer frenzy
This week, the limited-edition Lilly Pulitzer collection went live on their website, giving Black Friday a run for it’s money. The resulting spike in traffic was too much for the site, causing it to crash several times and leaving customers unable to view their carts. Eventually, the entire Target website was overwhelmed and went down. Target responded to frustrated shoppers via Twitter, announcing that they were adjusting the site. Many customers noted that at that point it didn’t matter, because most of the stock sold out within minutes.
This isn’t the first time Target has experienced a crash after launching a fashion line. The 2011 limited edition launch of a high end Italian line, Missoni, caused the site to crash and remain down for most of the day. Many customers turned to the official Lilly Pulitzer website after the crash.
Security advisory goes out regarding WordPress Plugins and themes
A vulnerability re-discovered last week prompted a coordinated plugin update between multiple developers and the WordPress core security team to address a cross-site scripting (XSS) security vulnerability. The vulnerability was created after developers were misled by the WordPress Official Documentation, and misused two common functions. The add_query_arg() and remove_query_arg() functions are often used by developers to modify and add query strings to URLs. The two functions do not escape user input automatically, meaning the use of functions such as esc_url() or esc_url_raw() is necessary.
The Sucuri team analyzed the top 300-400 plugins, and found at least 15 different plugins containing the vulnerability:
Jetpack
WordPress SEO
Google Analytics by Yoast
All In one SEO
Gravity Forms
Multiple Plugins from Easy Digital Downloads
UpdraftPlus
WP-E-Commerce
WPTouch
Download Monitor
Related Posts for WordPress
My Calendar
P3 Profiler
Give
Multiple iThemes products including Builder and Exchange
Broken-Link-Checker
Ninja Forms
Whether your site uses any of the plugins listed above, it’s a good idea to update your plugins immediately to eliminate any risk.
IBM brings security analytics to the cloud
This Tuesday, IBM announced it will be launching two new threat analytic services in the cloud as Software as a Service tools to give companies the ability to quickly prioritize security threats.
The two new cloud services include IBM Security Intelligence and Intelligent Log Management. By bringing it’s Security Intelligence technology to the cloud, IBM customers will be able to analyze security threat information from over 500 different data sources for devices, systems and applications to determine if a real security threat exists, or if the security related events are simply anomalies. “The option of doing predictive analytics via the cloud gives security teams the flexibility to bring in skills, innovation and information on demand across all of their security environments.” said Jason Corbin, vice president of product management and strategy at IBM.
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]]> Google modifies the structure of URLs on mobileThis week Google made a change to the URL structure that is displayed normally from a mobile search, explaining that “well-structured URLs offer users a quick hint about the page topic and how the page fits within the website”. The algorithms were updated starting in the USin an effort to display names that would better reflect the page. This will structure the results using a breadcrumbs-like format, and use the “real-world name of the site” instead of the domain name. I checked search results on my mobile, but the change had not appeared to be made yet. Here is an example search Google used:
To complement the launch, Google also announced support for schema.org, a site that provides a collection of schemas that webmasters can use to markup HTML pages in ways recognized by major search engines. This intends to help webmasters signal both the website name that should be used instead of the domain name, as well as the URL structure as breadcrumbs.
Here are the examples Google pointed to in their documentation on site names and breadcrumbs.
The announcement garnered mixed reactions. While some people are calling the change helpful, arguing that the change encourages better site organization, others argue that by not displaying the actual URL, users no longer could easily verify the true identity of a site. What do you think about this interesting development?
Google adds mobile-friendliness as a part of their ranking algorithm
Tomorrow marks the official launch of Google’s new ranking algorithm, which will add mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. Although Google held a live Q&A hangout a month ago, it was somewhat unclear whether or not the changes could be seen before the official launch date on April 21st.
So how do you know if your page is mobile friendly? The easiest way to check if a page on your site passes is by typing in the URL here.
This will test the way your site looks to a Googlebot. It checks for:
A few easy ways to see what your site looks like on an array of different devices, and to start making your site mobile-friendly, can be found in our responsive web design blog post.
Additional algorithm details to note include:
Zuckerberg’s internet.org loses support, with companies siting net neutrality concerns
A facebook backed project intended to make the internet accessible for people in the developing world has lost the support of several prominent companies this week. In the midst of a fierce national debate regarding net neutrality, the New Delhi Television Limited (NDTV), the Times Group, a media company that owns Times of India, and Cleartrip, a travel website all removed content from Internet.org in India, which they had made available for free. Furthermore, the companies urged its competitors to withdraw as well.
“We support net neutrality because it creates a fair, level playing field for all companies – big and small – to produce the best service and offer it to consumers. We will lead the drive towards a neutral internet, but we need our fellow publishers and content providers to do so as well, so that the playing field continues to be level.” – statement from a Times official.
The companies sited concerns that the Internet.org initiative did not align with the net neutrality mission, arguing that Internet.org is set up to prioritize content from partner businesses who pay telecom companies for data charges.
Zuckerberg responded to critics, affirming that net neutrality and Internet.org “can and must coexist.” He detailed his stance on the controversy, proclaiming that “Internet.org doesn’t block or throttle any other services or create fast lanes — and it never will. We’re open for all mobile operators and we’re not stopping anyone from joining. We want as many internet providers to join so as many people as possible can be connected.”
The Internet.org initiative has reportedly expanded internet accesss to over six countries so far, including Columbia, India, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya and Ghana. Still, some worry that the long term net neutrality implications outweigh the immediate access it provides to the developing world.
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]]> This week in web performance news, Github victors over DDoS attacks, IE’s replacement gets clarifications, and IBM invests in the Internet of Things.GitHub DDOS attack
This week GitHub endured a large scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) that began on March 26th and lasted for 5 days. GitHub said there were a number of vectors being used in this attack, including sophisticated techniques that used the web browsers of unsuspecting users to flood the GitHub site with traffic. While GitHub proclaimed the attack was the largest in company history, they were able to mitigate and deflect most of the evolving attack, maintaining stable service overall. In fact, watching the status messages from GitHub was kind of exciting.
The GitHub pages targeted by redirecting search traffic from Chinese search engine Baidu included a Chinese anti-censorship service GreatFire.org and a mirror site of The New York Times’ Chinese edition. Security experts analyzing the attacks reported that the machines attacking GitHub were located “on or near the Great Firewall of China”, and while other explanations were possible, “the overwhelmingly most likely suspect for the source of the GitHub attacks is the Chinese government.”
Clarifications on Project Spartan replacing IE
The head of Microsoft Marketing, Chris Capossela, recently announced IE would no longer continue as a brand and will be replaced by Project Spartan, their next generation browser.
Last week on the IE blog, the Project Spartan team announced there will be a clean distinction between the legacy and new browser in an effort to simplify the role of each browser. On Windows 10, Project Spartan will host an entirely new engine. Similarly, IE 11 will remain fundamentally the same from Windows 8.1 and will exclusively use the legacy engine.
“Project Spartan is our future” said Kyle Pflug, the Project Spartan program manager. Calls for help from developers were made to test their new rendering engine in the Windows 10 Technical Preview.
IBM invests $3 Billion in the Internet of Things
IBM announced that it would be investing $3 billion dollars over the next four years on a business model aiming to analyze the growth of data being generated by a surplus of devices containing sensors connected to the internet. IBM’s new Internet of Things foundation is a cloud software tool that gives clients and partner companies the ability to modify their existing apps, or even build new ones. IBM can then analyze the data collected from the applications from a large variety of devices. In addition to creating and selling software to help businesses analyze their data, IBM is also designing supercomputer hardware capable of efficiently storing and computing large amounts of data.
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]]> This week in web performance, Google clarified the new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm details, Facebook open-sourced its Augmented Traffic Control tool, and internet service providers filed lawsuits against the FCC to stop net neutrality.
Google clarifies the Mobile-friendly algorithm details
The April 21st launch date for the new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm is approaching quickly, This week Google held a live Q&A hangout to provide more details about what we can expect.
Here’s what you need to know:
So how do you know if your page is friendly? The easiest way to check if your page passes is by typing in your site’s URL here.
The most important criteria that need to be met by Googlebots are:
It’s important to note that a page may look perfect on your device, but may look completely different on your coworker’s phone. A few easy ways to start making your site mobile-friendly can be found in our responsive web design blog post. It’s also very important to note that there are over 200 different criteria used to rank your site, so it’s possible these changes may not affect your site very much.
Internet providers file lawsuits to reverse net neutrality laws
USTelecom (who represents AT&T), Verizon, Alamo Broadband, and other companies, filed two separate lawsuits against the Federal Communications Commission in the US Court of Appeals this week. The companies want the FCC rules to be ignored and say the FCC acted outside of their authority, violating the companies’ constitutional rights. Both suits acknowledged the their challenges may be premature, but were filed nonetheless “out of an abundance of caution.” The FCC acknowledged the suits and believed that the petitions for review filed were “premature and subject to dismissal.”
Facebook to bring fast internet to the entire world by open sourcing its Augmented Traffic Tool
This week, Facebook announced they would be making their custom built Augmented Traffic Control (ATC) tool open-source. Facebook developers have used the tool to simulate different types of network connections, including older 2G and Edge mobile data networks, and networks that frequently become disconnected. By testing how a site or app perform under these conditions , they are able to optimize their app performance in low connection areas around the world.
The tool started out as an open-source project itself, and now can continue to evolve, allowing developers around the world to use and improve it. Mark Zuckerberg recently spoke about Internet.org at the 2015 Mobile World Congress in Spain. The not for profit is Facebook’s commitment to make the internet accessible to people in the developing world and wrote in his letter to potential investors, “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”
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]]> This week in web performance, we saw announcements from Apple, Chinese tech giants joining the auto-industry, and Bitcoin struggles with handling denial of service attacks.Spring Forward developer announcements from Apple
Announcements from Apple always bring exciting discussion to the tech world, and this time was no different. Apple made several announcements on Monday, including ResearchKit, an open-source software framework to attempt to integrate medical and health research with iPhone apps. Other exciting developer announcements included the OS X Server 4.1 Developer Preview, as well as new Xcode 6.3 beta 3 which includes iOS 8.3 SDK and Swift 1.2.
China’s tech companies announce plans to invade the auto industry
Two more tech giants are jumping into the self-driving car industry. Just a few days later, Alibaba, China’s biggest tech company, announced a joint venture with Saic, China’s largest auto company. The plans is to build a connected car that would communicate with other vehicles through the cloud. Just a few days earlier, Baidu, a Chinese search engine declared that they have been working with auto manufacturers. Both suggested a self-driving car could hit the road within the next year. Over the past month, rumors of Apple joining the auto industry and poaching engineers for an electric car project have caused quite a stir, although Mercedes Benz is not concerned with the competition.
Find out how much your site costs through new tool from webpagetest.org
For those of us in the web performance world, webpagetest.org has been a very useful tool. WebPageTest is an open-source project, primarily supported by Google that can be used to analyze website performance. This week, a new addition to this tool that can be used to estimate how much your website would cost users around the world to load. Whatdoesmysitecost.com will either use your website URL or WebPageTest ID and then will test your site. Try it out!
Bitcoin mining pools targeted in multiple DDOS attacks
Mobile currency mining pools are being held for ransom, in recent distributed denial of service attacks that began this month. AntPool, BW.com, NiceHash, CKPool and GHash.io are among a number of Bitcoin mining pools and operations that have been hit, and attackers are demanding a ransom of 5 to 10 Bitcoin in order to stop the attacks. Many suspect attacks like this are likely to continue. Check out our recent discussion, where we ask if load testing can stop hackers. In other Bitcoin news, T-mobile announced this week that they will begin to accept Bitcoin as payment in Poland. In fact, they’re even offering a 20% discount for Bitcoin users.
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]]> This week in web performance, we take a look at the Mobile World Congress highlights and Google’s new developments in quantum computing.Barcelona hosts Mobile World Congress
This week, the 2015 Mobile World Congress brought 93,000 attendees to Barcelona, Spain with over 2,000 exhibitors and 3,800 analysts. Over 40 keynotes were given, featuring Mark Zuckerberg and Tom Wheeler, GSMA hosted the GSMA Seminar Program and highlighted the Connected Living innovations, and the 20th Annual Global Mobile Awards recognized outstanding industry leaders. This event reminded us that it’s the Internet of Everything era, with smart cars, appliances, vending machines and even city lights announced. Additional gadgets announced at the MWC included new phones, including the new Galaxy S6, new wearables, including the Huawei Watch, and new virtual reality headsets, including the HTC Vive.
Google improves SSL Warnings
Google has expanded its efforts to keep you safe online. New additions in Chrome, Search, and even advertisements have been made to keep you even safer from sites where unwanted software downloads are available that attempt or make undesired changes on your computer. Adrienne Porter Felt from the Google Security Team highlighted that one of the most important factors of the SSL warnings is that the browser warns only when it’s really under attack. In addition, the team had to strategize on how to best convey the threat in a way users could understand.
Apple Pay fraud increases due to lax bank ID checks
Apple Pay fraud is on the rise, ultimately highlighting a potential problem for all mobile payment systems. Using tokenized Device Account Numbers and the Touch ID fingerprint system, Apple Pay was initially praised for its increased security when it was launched in October 2014. However, reports earlier this week indicate that criminals have successfully set up iPhones with stolen personal information, gaining encrypted versions of victim’s credit cards by calling banks to authenticate a victim’s card on the new device. Banks are already responding by stepping up security measures required to verify your identity, including one-time authorization tokens, calls to customer service and logging into your online banking.
Google Tests First Error-Correction in Quantum Computing
Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara and Google reported on Wednesday that they had made a significant development in quantum computing, successfully creating the world’s first error-correcting quantum circuit. The system under test was able to stabilize a fragile array of nine qubits, the quantum analogue of the traditional bit. The researchers said they had accomplished this by creating circuits in which they used additional qubits to observe the state of computing qubits without altering their state. “Quantum computing becomes viable when a quantum state can be protected from environment-induced error “ said researchers in the Nature journal article.
Hear of any other interesting web or tech news this week? Let us know in a comment below!
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]]> It’s a great week on the internet! This week in web performance the preservation of net neutrality and new announcements from Google and Apple make headlines.
FCC votes to preserve net neutrality, classifying broadband as a utility
Yesterday the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to approve the proposed net neutrality rules for both wireless and fixed broadband. The proposed rules will disallow paid prioritization, as well as the blocking and throttling of lawful content and services. After overwhelming public outcry, this win for advocates of net neutrality is being called “the free speech victory of our times” and “an even bigger win than SOPA”. But the debate looks to be far from over.
Response from Verizon came in both morse code and typewriter font saying the rules were “written in the era of the steam locomotive and the telegraph. In addition, a group of 21 republicans sent a response to FCC chairman Tom Wheeler threatening legislation that would “ensure the antitrust laws are the preferred enforcement method against anticompetitive conduct on the Internet” and that “may include a restriction on the FCC’s ability to regulate the Internet.”
Apple to spend $1.9 Billion on European data centers powered by renewable energy
In what will be Apple’s biggest investment in Europe to date, Apple announced plans to build and operate two new data centers in Denmark and Ireland. Running entirely on renewable energy, the data centers will power several of Apple’s online services for European customers, including the iTunes Store®, App Store℠, iMessage®, Maps and Siri®. The operations are expected to launch in 2017 and will include initiatives to restore native trees to Derrydonnell Forest, provide an outdoor education space for local schools, and create a walking trail for the community. “We believe that innovation is about leaving the world better than we found it, and that the time for tackling climate change is now,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environmental Initiatives.
Apple releases new Playgrounds
The new Xcode 6.3 beta 2 now contains improvements to Swift playgrounds, with inline results, stylized text, and a resources folder. The new playgrounds were made to be useful for authors and educators.
Google introduces a new open source HTTP/2 RPC Framework
Google has introduced a new open source (BSD-licensed) cross-platform library for making remote procedure calls. Built on the recently finalized HTTP/2 specification, gRPC will allow for bidirectional streaming, flow control, header compression, multiplexing requests over a single TCP connection and more. In addition to gRPC, Google has released a new version of Protocol Buffers, an open source binary serialization protocol intended to allow easy definition of services and automatic generation of client libraries. The project has support for several different programming languages (C, C++, Java, Go, Node.js, Python, and Ruby) with libraries for several others (Objective-C, PHP and C#) in development. Google indicated that they have begun to use gRPC internally in order to begin transitioning to HTTP/2.
A look ahead: Barcelona will host Mobile World Congress
The first week of March brings along the exciting 2015 Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona, Spain. The four day event is like the Ted Talks of mobile tech, with thought-leadership keynotes from Mark Zuckerberg and Tom Wheeler, numerous panel discussions, and 1900 technology and product exhibitors. The event will feature the Global Mobile Awards, and App Planet, an opportunity for the mobile app community to come together to learn and network. In addition, all attendees will gain access to 4 Years From Now, a 3 day event focused on startups and corporations, led by globally recognized entrepreneurship and innovation experts.
Other headlines this week:
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]]> There were a lot of interesting things going on in the web performance world this week! New Google tools and developer news made headlines, as well as the Ocean’s Eleven of cyber crime.
In possibly one of the greatest bank heists ever, hackers installed spyware on the computers of over 100 different financial institutions in 25 different countries, including the US. By mimicking the regular bank workflows, they were able to transfer between $2.5 and $10 million from each bank into their own accounts. The Ocean’s Eleven of cyber attacks is suspected to have gone on for ever two years and isn’t over yet. Kaspersky labs say the “attacks remain active”, naming the malware “Carbanak”.
Kaspersky Lab recently released a report on a highly sophisticated threat actor they named the Equation group. The group uses multiple techniques to infect victims, ranging from the internet to USB drives. Kaspersky noted the malware’s complexity as “the most advanced threat actor they have ever seen”, also able to infect hard drive firmware. Kaspersky also stated that they believed that the Equation group developers may be the same creators of Stuxnet, a worm discovered in 2010 believed to be the US government.
Project Zero, a Google team that aims to significantly reduce the number of people harmed by targeted attacks, gives vendors 90 days to patch security flaws. After that, the company automatically discloses the reported vulnerabilities, regardless of whether a fix is available. Project Zero has adhered to a 90-day deadline, but in order to enforce consistent deadlines for edge cases, a few changes have been added. Deadlines that end on weekends or holidays will move to the next normal work day, a 14-day grace period can be added, and CVE identifiers, an industry standard for identifying vulnerabilities, will be pre-assigned. The rest of Google will now be following the same policy.
How do you benchmark cloud providers? Google cloud users were having trouble evaluating the performance of cloud offerings too. One week ago today, Google released a free, open source cloud performance benchmarking framework called PerfKit to do just that. Working with over 30 different researchers, companies, and customers, the Perkit Explorer was made to help you interpret results. In addition to reporting on the most standard metrics of peak performance, it measures the end to end time to provision resources in the cloud. You can try this out new tool out yourself with a free Google Cloud Platform now. I definitely will be.
Also in Google news, this week Google Maps is celebrating their 10 year anniversary! Happy anniversary, Google Maps!
The FCC will vote on net neutrality regulations during it’s meeting on February 26th. Tom Wheeler has said he will circulate proposed new rules to preserve the internet as an open platform to the FCC, and the vote on whether or not to classify the internet as a public utility will commence at the February 26th meeting.
Hear of any other interesting web or tech news this week? Let us know in a comment!
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]]> As mobile app usage increases, load testing mobile apps is becoming a key part of the software development lifecycle to make sure your application is ready for traffic. If your mobile app interacts with your application server via REST or SOAP API calls, then LoadStorm PRO can load test mobile app servers like yours.LoadStorm PRO uses HTTP archive (HAR) recordings to simulate traffic, and we normally create these recordings using a browser’s developer tools on the network tab to record all requests sent to the target server. In this article, I’m going to introduce you to two ways to make recordings of user traffic that can be used in LoadStorm. The first involves packet capturing from your mobile device, and the second involves a Chrome app called Postman used in combination with the Chrome developer tools.
If you like to keep things simple, then this method should save you the trouble of manually creating requests as shown in the next method. You’ll need a packet capturing mobile app (such as tPacketCapture) that stores requests in the PCAP file format, and allows you to share the PCAP file. The PCAP file generated by the app can then be converted to a HAR file to be uploaded into LoadStorm for use in a load test. To do this, you can use PCAP Web Performance Analyzer for free without needing any setup, or you can install your own converter from the pcap2har project on GitHub.
For Android devices, this method works as follows:
Click to Zoom
For iOS devices:
At this time, packet capturing mobile apps are only offered on Android devices. Apple products do not support direct packet capture services. However, if you connect your iOS device to a Mac via USB then you can use OS X supported software (such as Cocoa Packet Analyzer) to capture the packets, as described on the Apple developer site.
To make a recording with the Postman app, follow these steps:
Click to Zoom
REST
Making RESTful GET or POST requests will rely heavily on your knowledge of how your mobile app interacts with the application server. If you have a network log that shows the incoming requests from the mobile application, that can help simplify the reconstruction of those requests in the Postman app. Postman actually offers 11 methods for interacting with an application server, and of these we’ll typically only need to use GET and POST requests:
In some cases you will also need to add some form of authorization token in the request headers to let the application server know you have the rights to GET or POST information. Postman offers a few options to assist with authorization settings (i.e. Basic Auth, Digest, and OAuth 1.0), but you can always manually input the authorization header if you know the name of the header, the value, and format to send it in.
SOAP
Even though Postman is primarily designed to work with RESTful API calls, it can also work with SOAP.
To make SOAP requests follow these steps:
Click to Zoom
Additional information about creating SOAP requests can be found on the Postman blog.
Video Tutorial
This video is a short guide on recording a HAR using Postman in combination with the Chrome developer tools.
Also check out Ruairi Browne’s Postman tutorial covering RESTful API GETs and POSTs to Twitter as well as OAuth1.0 credentials.
To load test a mobile application using LoadStorm PRO, a HAR recording must be made to simulate the traffic. Once you’ve decided on a recording method, all you have to do is upload your HAR file into LoadStorm, and you’ll be on your way to load testing your app and ensuring end-user satisfaction. If you have questions or need assistance, please contact , visit our learning center, or leave a comment below.
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