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Stack OverflowLightweight alternative to soapui?
[+23] [8] opensas
[2010-04-04 16:41:42]
[ web-services soap soapui lightweight ]
[ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2575101/lightweight-alternative-to-soapui ] [DELETED]

I'm developing a soap web service and I'm using soapui to test it.

I just need to read the wsdl file, automatically generate a skeleton request and see the results, and I was wondering if there's a lighter alternative to soapui.

[+13] [2010-08-10 14:46:01] Shekhar Arya

Storm

http://storm.codeplex.com/

Simple and lightweight. Cool.


This is a really nice tool. Finally! I really hate SoapUI. - Alex Beardsley
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[+9] [2010-10-11 07:55:06] baranco

Try

Membrane SOAP Client [1]

It is also open source and it creates forms out of the WSDL description that make it easy to specify a request.

alt text

[1] http://www.membrane-soa.org/soap-client/

(1) Membrane produces non namespace aware requests from imported web service definition, take care. - Martin K.
(2) Buggy for me. Crashes if started with a saved WSDL URL currently unavailable. Fails to make a request while SoapUI was able to. Loses field values sometimes. Wrongly formats dates (without leading zero in month). - Victor Sergienko
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[+6] [2011-07-12 20:52:27] Gustavo P. S.

It's been more than a year since this question was asked, but I must include this answer since this question appears in the first Google apperances and in fact it's a really useful solution in a ultra light (< 50 kb!) tester of webservices. Besides, it is opensource.

Wizdl Is a .NET utility written in C# that allows you to quickly import and test web services within the comfort of a Windows Forms GUI.

It supports calling complex web services that take arrays and deeply nested objects as parameters.

At CodePlex: http://wizdl.codeplex.com/

At Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/wizdl/


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[+3] [2010-04-07 03:45:28] Chris Thornton

Why not just write a little soap client in the language of your choice? All it has to do is send the httprequest and dump the result, either from/to text files or stdin/stdout.


In fact, I'd like the tool to build the xml request skeleton for me... (update the question to reflect this) - opensas
(1) @opensas - you can generate the XML skeleton in SoapUI, then feed it into your lightweight tool. - Chris Thornton
(1) SOAP and HTTP libraries are minimum requirements, but are not sufficient. SoapUI does much more than simply send the request and dump the response. Not only can SoapUI generate SOAP requests from a WSDL, verify that the SOAP response is valid and not a fault message, but it can also apply other assertions like XPath and XQuery matches. Thus, you may also need an XPath and/or XQuery library to reproduce these assertions using a script or program. - Derek Mahar
depending on what you're testing (eg. response-content or wss) it may be useful to have more control over the request headers than what is offered by a gui client - andersand
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[+2] [2010-10-12 16:54:34] Derek Mahar

Is this really all that you need from your SOAP test client? If so, then what you need is not a test tool like SoapUI [1], but simply a SOAP client library [2] that can send a request and receive a response and confirm that it is a valid SOAP message. But this is not sufficient to perform true tests like SoapUI.

SoapUI does much more than simply send the request and read the response. Not only can SoapUI generate SOAP requests from a WSDL and verify that the SOAP response is valid and not a fault message, but it can also apply other assertions like XPath [3] and XQuery [4] pattern matches. These matches can, for example, compare a subset of the nodes in the body of a response to an expected XML fragment. Provided that you need to test such assertions on part of the response content, then any test tool that you choose should support XPath and/or XQuery matching.

[1] http://www.soapui.org/
[2] http://ws.apache.org/axis2/
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath20/
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery/

yeap, I don't need a test tool (in the sense of unit tests...) I just need a quick and simple soap client... - opensas
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[+1] [2010-04-04 17:01:12] nstehr

If you aren't opposed to doing a little scripting, I've used Suds [1]. Its a python library that I've used a fair number of times to test SOAP based web services, when I either didn't have a client or didn't want to use soapui.

[1] https://fedorahosted.org/suds/

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[+1] [2011-09-22 23:04:48] karthi

If all you ask for simple lightweight...why can't you use CURL command line or ApacheJmeter?


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[-3] [2010-04-04 16:49:02] Ashish Gupta

Have you already tried tcptrace [1]?

[1] http://www.tcptrace.org/

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