if the Calamari app is a Python WSGI application then you would not need to run the actual application as a real HTTP service, you would just need to test against the WSGI app.

The same HTTP methods and responses would be triggered as you talk to the application except that it would be *much* less expensive to run tests and less prone to network errors.

The only thing you would need from Calamari would be the actual WSGI app object. For talking and testing it I highly recommend WebTest http://webtest.pythonpaste.org/en/latest/ (see the examples on the requests and responses)

The number one instant benefit: you will never need an actual instance running Calamari in some server.