Maybe the best place to start is to go over what exactly the Karate Test Automation tool is. So if we head over to this website here at Karate Labs, this is basically the home page for Karate. So we can see from this page that Karate is an open-source test automation platform. It says here that the platform unifies API testing, API performance testing, API mocks, and UI testing. This is actually a really big deal. Most test automation frameworks only support one type of testing, I'm not actually aware of any framework that actually supports all of the different types, i.e. automation, performance, UI, mocking, etc. This is one of the main benefits of using Karate and you can unify all of your different testing types under one single framework. All of your automation performance, UI testing, etc. that can all live within one framework instead of having to be dispersed between multiple different frameworks.
If we go down a bit, we can see some of the different customers that Karate has and there are some quite big names here. So Walmart, Accenture, SAP, etc.. So Karate is clearly already widely used among these very big blue chip companies. If we scroll down a bit more, we can read a bit more about the different products that Karate offers. Karate again offers API testing, performance testing, mocking, and even API documentation is available here as well. All under this one same tool. We go down a bit more, we can read about some of the integrations that Karate integrates with. Again, there are some quite big names here, Source Labs, GitHub, Spring, Jenkins, etc.. So we can already just see from these few integrations that are shown here how mature Karate is and that it integrates with these popular tools already. We can go down a bit more, we get a few more resources which are just telling us a bit more about how to use Karate. We have more documentation on the API testing, performance testing, etc. and some more instructions and getting started guides that can help you just to get onboarded and to start using Karate.
Let me jump back over to my slides and let's talk a bit about some of the features of Karate. So the first feature to call out is that Karate has incredibly simple syntax. So Karate Tests are just written in human readable language. We actually use what's called the Gherkin syntax. And we just write tests using the framework of basically saying given, when, then. We're going to be saying that in the course in the moment. But just know that you don't really need to know any coding in order to write Karate Tests because you can just use this syntax that's human-readable, and very easy to learn. It means that you can get up and running very quickly. And again, you don't really need to know any coding in order to write Karate Tests, but it's really easy to get the tool set up and configured and to just start writing automation tests straight away. Often with a lot of frameworks, you have to go for a lot of configuration, or there's often a steep learning curve that you have to go through in order to learn the tool and learn how to use it effectively. With Karate, that isn't really true. It really works straight out of the box pretty much straight away. You can start writing meaningful tests with hardly any background knowledge and having to do hardly any pre set up at all. So ease of use is definitely one of the big plus points. Another benefit called out Karate's versatility. Again, we talked a bit about how we can have our automation test and performance test living within the same framework, but you can actually reuse the same Karate Test you've already written. For example, to write an automation test. You can reuse that same code to write a performance test as well. And finally, there's a really active community around Karate as well. Because it's an open-source tool and it's been around for a few years, there's a big community of developers that use the tool that can help you to, if you're stuck or if you need help with onboarding, or if you just need advice and guidance on how to write your tests. It's a big community on sites like StackOverflow where there are lots of questions that have been asked and Karate. You can ask questions here yourself. If you're stuck on something, someone from the community will be able to come in and help you. Again, because this is an open-source tool, it's another really good reason to use it because there's such an active community.
Let's not waste any more time. Let's get straight into actually writing some Karate Tests ourselves and actually exploring this awesome tool.
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