Web Services Simulation

What should you do in your web services project when you're ready to start building your web services client, but your producer services is not ready? The answer is simple: Use Web Service Simulation. The obvious advantages of Service Simulation are as follows:

• Reduce Overall development time by making simulated services available before they are built.
• Tell the client whether it's sending the right messages to the service. For example, the service may be expecting a SAML token and the body of the message has to be signed. A service simulator can ensure that the client (consumer) is indeed following such requirements even before the producer services are built.

Here's a whitepaper that provides details on how to use service simulation to shorten your SOA projects while making your service invocations cleaner and more interoperable.

Accelerate your SOA Projects through Service Simulation

The consequences of overlooking SOA testing blind spots

Colleen Frye, News Writer for SearchSoftwareQuality.com published a valuable article on the consequences of overlooking SOA Testing Blindspots. Rizwan Mallal, quoted in this article, highlights a couple of solid technical points:

1. HTTP 200 codes, although important in web site testing, are insufficient for web services testing that requires deeper content inspection to decide whether a request-response pair is successful.
2. Simply sending the same message over and over again is Performance Testing is incorrect and flawed. Most endpoints enforce security that requires message uniqueness and detect for message replay-type attacks. Most testing tools that started as web application testing tools lack web services testing features and are inadequate for SOA Testing.

SOAPSonar from Crosscheck Networks, unlike other products in the industry is built ground-up for SOA/Web Service Testing and has all the XML, SOAP, WSDL, WS-Security, WS-Trust, MTOM type standards that are inherently available for functional, performance, interoperability and security testing with a very simple to use user interface that doesn't require an army of consultants to install and configure. Plus Crosscheck provides a Personal Edition of the product for free.

For a detailed article on SOA Testing Blindspots see: Watch your SOA Testing Blindspots