Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Wash Away Those Web Service Testing Blues with Parasoft's SOAPtest

Although its load-testing reporting functionality is limited, SOAPtest does an excellent job of functional and regression testing, and makes failure analysis a breeze. And the ability to view entire Web services transactions at the protocol level, apply XSLT transformations and validate XML (among many others) more than make up for the product's less robust reporting aspects.

In addition, SOAPtest can test any Web service. I tried it out with services developed using Microsoft .Net, Apache SOAP, Cape Clear Software's CapeConnect and The Mind Electric's GLUE and encountered no problems.

Wash...

I downloaded SOAPtest from the Parasoft Web site, installed it on a Red Hat Linux 7.2 machine in our Real-World Labs® in Green Bay, Wis., and started it up with only one glitch--the shell script needed to be modified so a single environment variable pointed to the installation directory. After that, it was smooth sailing.

SOAPtest requires JDK or JRE 1.3 or higher; I used JDK 1.4. The user interface is not as intuitive as other Web service testing tools I've used (see "Empirix's FirstAct Promises Greater Things To Come for Evaluating Web Services"). To help you get acquainted with the software, Parasoft will have a tech support staffer walk you through a live demonstration before you download an evaluation version. I was able to muddle through basic testing without the demonstration but would have saved some time if I had let tech support go through it with me.

  • 1