How would you mock calls to a (third-party) web-service?

locked_user sundialsvc4 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

An app has to talk to a web-service (the usual REST and JSON) that doesn’t provide for a sandbox. The actual HTTP exchange does not need to be tested, merely that a set of “canned” known-good responses are in fact parsed correctly. (For a URL-string that looks like this, the response should be (one-of-these).) Without creating two programs that now have to be debugged, how might you go about doing that in the context of a .t test?

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Re: How would you mock calls to a (third-party) web-service? by Corion (Patriarch) on May 28, 2013 at 18:20 UTC
LWP::UserAgent can conveniently read `file://` URLs, so at least the REST part is easily mocked out by accessing `file://` URLs instead of setting up a HTTP server, at least as long as you can make the URLs look something like a file system. Otherwise, I would use something like Test::HTTP::LocalServer, which echoes you the URL back, and mock/retrieve the canned content separately.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: How would you mock calls to a (third-party) web-service? by locked_user sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on May 28, 2013 at 20:25 UTC
Meditating on Test::LWP::UserAgent and mod:://Test::Mock::LWP, trending toward the former. Humbly petitioning for the wisdom of the Wise, that ye may bequeath upon this penitent the benefit of thy Hard Knocks ... `;-)`