Recently my employer was having issues verifying if Web Services deployed to our application servers were really working correctly. We have a Oracle OC4J Application Server, and for some reason the test web page that is automatically generated with the service does not work. Since the web service test pages were not working, developers assumed that the web services were not working on our system. This generated one of the great and not at all helpful call tickets to Oracle.

Oracle contacted our server administrators and worked with them for days to figure out if the web services were actually working in our environment. After not much help at all they determined that our server environment was not allowing the web services to work correctly and pretty much dropped the support at that. Oracle, of course did not use any client tools to test the web service, but instead just used the Oracle generated web service test page.

I was not satisfied that web services were not working for us and decided to do some testing of my own. I wanted to do some quick web service testing using a dummy client to preform my tests from a external application. This is when I came across soapUI. Using soapUI I was able to successfully test the web service deployed to our application servers, get a response back, and verify that Oracle had no clue what they were doing.

soapUI
SoapUI is a great tool for any developer who wants to test web services to verify that they are working correctly. I have not only used this tool to help display that our web services were indeed working, but also have shared it with other users who wanted to get access to our web service.

This tool has helped me debug issues with my code, how my codes client software might not be setup correct, and help identify issues with other users software. The soup ui client is free to use and is a java webstart application, so it can be run on any system.

The tool has a very nice interface and sets up easy to use test stubs for you to use after pointing to the wsdl location for the web service. So the next time you need to do a quick web service test or debug your client web service code, give this tool a try. It really is a great freebie.

Feature Overview

soapUI is a free and open source desktop application for inspecting, invoking, developing, simulating/mocking and functional/load/compliance testing of web services over HTTP. It is mainly aimed at developers/testers providing and/or consuming web services (Java, .net, etc). Functional and Load-Testing can be done both interactively in soapUI or within an automated build/integration process using the soapUI command-line tools. Mock Web Services can easily be created for any WSDL and hosted from within soapUI or using the command-line MockService runner. IDE-plugins are available for eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans and a specialized eclipse-plugin for JBossWS. soapUI requires Java 1.5 and is licensed under the LGPL license.