Embodiments of the present invention provide a method, system and computer program product for a smart cache for server testing in an application development tool. In an embodiment of the invention, method of smart caching of service data during application testing in a development tool for a service invoking application is provided. The method includes loading source code for a computer program into a development tool executing in memory of a computing system. The method further includes executing the source code from the development tool. In this regard, the execution of the source code invokes a service responsive to a directive to invoke the service disposed in the source code. Finally, the method includes invoking the service in a container instance in response to a first invocation of the service from the computer program. However, a data set for the service is located in a cache and returned the data set to the computer program in lieu of invoking the service in the container instance for all other invocations of the service.