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Wash Away Those Web Service Testing Blues with Parasoft's SOAPtest: Page 5 of 5

One of SOAPtest's personalities is the ability to act as a server. You might use this capability if you've developed a client to interact with a business partner's service or for individual testing of clients when the servers aren't ready yet for integration testing. Creating a server is easy. Specify the port and root directory and then add services. I created a service with a method "square"--which simply squared the number input--and I wrote some code. SOAPtest's scripting API offers Python, JavaScript and Java as options for defining server methods. I used Python and then started the server on Port 8081.

The biggest drawback to using SOAPtest as a service is that it does not generate the WSDL automatically for the service you create. Parasoft said this capability will be available in a future release. I created a test suite for this new service and defined the RPC router, method to call and parameters manually. The SOAPtest service worked just fine.

SOAPtest exposes its APIs so you can create a Web services "router" that approximates a software content switch--and makes routing decisions based on the payload, such as XML elements. Parasoft says this functionality, which is available to just about any Web service if you know how to use the request and response headers, is not intended for production environments--yet. The company is working on a version that is scalable and more robust.

Technology editor Lori MacVittie has been a software developer and a network administrator. Most recently, she was a member of the technical architecture team for a global transportation and logistics organization. Send your comments on this article to her at [email protected].