Tuesday, August 15, 2006

A nice soap test tool: SoapUI

Do you manually code test harnesses for your web services? It's a real pain, and because every web service is defined by its wsdl you shouldn't have to do it. I've been using a soap test tool called SoapUI for the last few weeks. It makes experimenting with raw web service requests a breeze. You just have to give it a wsdl url and it will construct an example request which you can fill in with some test values. Then it's just a question of waiting for the response. It saves all the different requests you make in a project file and you can change the endpoint to try out different deployments. It's also got facilities to do load testing and generate statistics for web services, but I haven't had a need to use that yet. The only downside about this tool is that it's got a nasty javaesque interface, cross platform UIs always suck, but this one is not too bad.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

pls give me the difference between soapui tool and qTP TOOL

Mike Hadlow said...

Sorry anonymous I've never heard of qTP.

Anonymous said...

Hi Mike,

You can also try out http://codeplex.com/storm

Mike Hadlow said...

Hi Anonymous,

Storm looks very cool. I especially like that it's written in F#.

Kaz Baygan said...

good tools... I have one that is a slightly different concept. It focuses on creating a portal for your Web services. List, expose and interrogate web services from a single portal. See http://www.codeplex.com/wsdldisco
Please let me know what you think...

Mike Hadlow said...

Hi Kaz, Thanks, WsdlDisco looks very interesting.

SoaMoaFan said...

You can also try out SoaMoa, very useful testing tool : http://soamoa.org

Mike Hadlow said...

Hi SoaMoaFan,

Your tool looks interesting, but you should really get someone to look at the English on your web site.

Anonymous said...

do any of these tools make inclusion of WS-Security create times, nonces, user/pass etc easier ? any tools easier to use for a typical non-technical tester

Anonymous said...

SOAP UI SUCKS! It constantly crashes and makes testing take much longer than necessary! Unfortunately it's my company's tool of choice or I'd change in a heartbeat! It locks up, throws out of memory errors, and just plain crashes making you loose all of your work back to the last save point. SOS for sure when using this gem of a piece of software! And to think they charge for the pro version!

Make routine fascinating! said...

SOAP UI is tool for debug (NOT FOR TEST AUTOMATION IN PRODUCTION)! On past project I had a lot of problem:
such as
-out of memory errors
-soap ui does not save your work correctly (groovy scripts interpret i++ as i=i+2)
-requests created with soap ui are not flexible and reusable
-could not be integrated with CI correctly
-team with more than 2 peolple will face problem of collaborating because soap ui is not integrated with git or other vcs and base soap ui xml is to difficult to merge

P.S. : Use web service api client, dont use SOAPUI