RESTful APIs have always been a big part of the Sugar application, as well as the most appropriate touchpoint for integrating with other enterprise systems. Unfortunately, for a long time they weren’t tested especially appropriately. Traditionally, REST APIs at Sugar were tested with PHPUnit, but only on the classes themselves – they weren’t actually tested via direct use of HTTP. Worse, the tests were messy – they often assumed existing data was present, and when it wasn’t, it was created and not deleted afterwards.
Thorn was envisioned as a solution to this problem. It’s intended to test Sugar’s RESTful API directly, abstract away unhelpful boilerplate, leave your database clean, and let you test like a user.
Thorn was open-sourced earlier this year after a brief internal testing period and is now available for any Sugar developer to use from github.com/sugarcrm/thorn. It is open source and available under the Apache License, version 2.0.
This initial post will focus on a technical and philosophical overview of Thorn. For usage information, see the Thorn website.
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