Service oriented architecture is not something new or cool anymore. From enterprise software to web sites, software exposing its functionality via web services is becoming increasingly common.
The question is how to test those services. One option is to use a unit testing framework and create tests calling the services in any programming language you are familiar with (Java + Junit, C# + Nunit, etc). Whether such tests can be called unit, functional or even integration tests is not that important, but this approach is probably best suited for developers creating tests themselves. It is also not quite convenient for ad-hoc or exploratory testing.
A lot of commercial Java application servers such as SAP NetWeaver provide built-in web-based tools for browsing and testing the deployed services on the server. Using such tool is a good option for ad-hoc testing, because usually the services are readily accessible in it without any need for additional configuration. If you don't have access to something like this or if you need more flexibility, like maybe saving the test parameters and creating whole test suites, you might want to look at SoapUI. This is a tool for web service testing that has a free (open source) version and a commercial 'Pro' version with additional features. The most useful 'pro' feature for me is the form-based interface for entering the input parameters for the service call. SoapUI allows you to create whole scenarios consisting of services called in sequence and exchanging data between them. It even has some performance / load testing features.
SoapUI seems to be the most popular tool for web service testing, but it has its quirks and is not always as robust as I would like it to be. I am curious if anyone knows something better out there.
How do you test your web services?
December 12th, 2009 § 1 comment