Chapter 1. Web Services Testing and soapUI

Web services are one of the key building blocks of service-oriented solutions. Because of their usage and importance in the enterprise applications, the project teams are expected to be knowledgeable and familiar with the technologies which are associated with web services and service-oriented architecture(SOA). The testing aspect of web services in particular is one of the key topics which needs to be discussed when you work with web services.

Web servics testing can be performed using many approaches. The client APIs included in web service frameworks such as Apache Axis2 can be used to programatically invoke web services. In addition to that, number of properitory and open source tools are avaialble to test web services automatically. soapUI is one such free and open source testing tool that suppots functional and non-functional evaluations of web services.

We will discuss the following topics in this chapter which will provide you with an introduction to the basic concepts of SOA, web services testing, and soapUI:

• Overview of some of the key characteristics of web services

• The role of web services in SOA

• Approaches of testing web services

• Web services testing challenges

• Introduction to soapUI

• Installing soapUI