Testing REST web services has never been easy. It requires a running web server, multiple threads, network conection and complex transaction management.

Ideally, web service test will have the following characteristics:

1. The experience of testing web service API is similar to that of testing a ActiveRecord model
2. Start up and shut down the web server for the purpose of running REST web services
3. Rollback test data after each test
4. Control fixture creation for REST web services
5. All tests are automatic

In this article, I demonstrate solutions to each of those mentioned by using ActiveResource and dRuby.

http://owenou.com/2011/07/20/testing-rest-web-services-with-rails.html.