Clean up your SOAP-based Web services

SOAP is the currency of the SOA marketplace - for now, anyway. Though SOAP's significance may diminish as Web services evolve, its importance for the time being is unquestionable. Therefore, a substantial portion of the QA work by Web service providers and consumers must entail verifying the accurate exchange of SOAP messages.

I had an opportunity to look a five such tools: AdventNet's QEngine, Crosscheck Networks SOAPSonar, iTKO's LISA, Mindreef's SOAPscope Server, and Parasoft's SOAtest. Readers of my earlier reviews of open source Web service testing apps will recall that those products required a relatively technical command of XML, SOAP, and WSDL (Web Service Definition Language). That is less a requirement with these tools; virtually all provide a user-friendly means of manipulating SOAP request-and-response data in ways that insulate the user from hands-on XML work.

Fundamentally, testing a SOAP-based Web service involves three activities: constructing a SOAP request, submitting it, and evaluating the response. As easy as that sounds, it is anything but. An effective SOAP-testing tool cannot simply rely on a user-friendly mechanism for building requests. It must also enable the user to organize and arrange requests in realistic sequences, provide a means of altering request input values, and intelligently tweak requests so as to expose the Web service to a range of good and bad usage scenarios. In short, you want the tool to run the Web service through a reasonable approximation of real-world activity.

Three open source Web service testing tools get high marks

Capable soapUI, TestMaker, and WebInject toolsets shine once you conquer their learning curves.