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What’s New?
Version 6.1.1.0 is now available on our website. It includes enhancements and corrections, including these:
For SOAPscope Server, Service Space certificates now apply to standard SSL connections in addition to WS-Security profiles.
WS-Security support has a new profile type
for "Username + Signing" to allow testing that requires both a Username
token and a separate x.509 certificate to sign the message.
SSL relaxed mode capability was added for LDAPS configurations.
It is easier to migrate your data from older versions of the software.
If you connect to a Mindreef version 5.x, 6.0 or 6.1 database, it is
automatically converted for use with the current software. Automatic
data migration supports SQL Server, Oracle, mySQL and Apache Derby. Note: Back up your database before proceeding. Data conversion cannot be reversed.
For SOAPscope Server and SOAPscope Tester only, data grids now handle data containing underscores and backslashes.
For SOAPscope Server and SOAPscope Tester only, data grid items occasionally shifted to the wrong column after editing and saving the Scenario Test. This fix required a change to the database schema.
For a complete list of updates, please visit this page. If you are a current customer with an active license key you can get this latest update here!
Want to add Load Testing to your Web services and SOA testing efforts? Take advantage of an upgrade offer here.
TrendWatch!
SOA Adoption Rises on Business Value - Forrester
Forrester Research published the results of its annual SOA adoption survey - pointing
to 2007 as a "banner year" and that "tighter IT budgets may actually
spur further SOA adoption" in the coming year. Among its findings,
Forrester notes that "the most critical aspects of SOA are
business-oriented, and SOA technology is merely a foundation for
business-oriented restructuring of IT's processes and deliverables...."
[READ more from
"SOA Adoption Rises on Business Value"].
Peering into the SOA Crystal Ball - What's in Store?
Eric Newcomer of the e-Commerce Times,
gazes into the SOA crystal ball to make some bold predictions about the
biggest influences on SOA projects this year. "In 2008, a growing
number of SOA deployments will start to adopt open source, such as
messaging and service enablement SOA products, and investigate one or
more of the cloud-based services available. It also seems likely that
SOA deployments will start to adopt some of the newer products based on
the large Web site scale out techniques to increase performance,
scalability and reliability..." [READ more from
"What's in Store for SOA in 2008?"]
Just For Laughs: IT Helps Business Feel "Cool" Again
If you need a mid-afternoon laugh, try
watching the latest spoof on YouTube on the PC vs. Apple commercial as
IT (Apple) helps restore Business' (PC) self confidence as he wonders
what the future holds... Watch as Business learns about the use SOA and
BPM to integrate data and manage orders faster... As IT says, "don't
let the three-letter acronym scare you...." [SEE for yourself "Apple Ad Spoof"] | | |
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Welcome from Mindreef President and CTO
Frank Grossman
Welcome to Mindreef Matters, where
we'll provide updates and information about issues, tools and
techniques that can help you with your Web services and SOA quality.
As I sit down to write this,
I'm reminded that we have unfortunately found ourselves in a climate
that is causing everyone to do a lot of rumbling and grumbling about
the economic and business outlook. Uncertainty is causing companies to
be far more conservative with their purchases - buying only those items
that will have high impact, and for good reason.
It's been shown many times over that finding and
fixing bugs early in the software development lifecycle is many
magnitudes less costly than waiting until the latter stages of testing
and deployment. This especially applies to service-oriented
architectures and services that are developed and used in different
environments, and consumed by multiple applications. Now is a good time
to invest in tools and apply best practices to shore up software and
service quality, and help you meet demanding performance requirements
and project schedules.
Among the many ways to achieve this is to start
your quality efforts as early as possible in the service development
lifecycle. Take steps to improve collaboration across the project team
so that code, tests and other project assets can be built once and
shared by many - including different team members in varying roles. The
earlier in the process that services can be tested, performance can be
scaled, and governance can be enforced, the more you and your team can
produce well performing services and applications that improve business
agility and efficiency, and boost the bottom line at a time when it is
needed most.
In this issue of Mindreef Matters,
we've included information for current Mindreef product users
regarding the latest release updates to Mindreef SOAPscope Server,
SOAPscope Developer, SOAPscope Tester, and SOAPscope Architect. We've
included an excerpt from our book Key Strategies for SOA Testing, co-authored with SOA industry
expert David Linthicum, and invite you to download a complementary copy
of this step-by-step guide to creating an effective SOA testing plan.
We'd also like your opinion about "high-use" web services, so please
fill out our short survey - it'll take you 2 minutes tops (and could
yield you something fun from the marketing grab bag).
Lastly, we've got a Tech Tip to help you improve service performance
with load checking. As always, we hope that you can put our products
and recommendations to work on your current project.
Until next issue,
![Frank_75x42[1]](http://image.exct.net/5b166019-d.jpg "Frank_75x42[1]")
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Survey Junkies Unite!
Take our quick 5
question survey about Web services. The results will be published in
our next newsletter. See how your web services projects compare with
others! And get a thank you gift from the Mindreef Marketing grab bag
(until the bag is empty).
Click to answer the survey
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Tech Tip: How to Load Check Your Service Performance
With Mindreef Load Check, included in SOAPscope Server and SOAPscope
Tester, you can build and test service performance from the earliest
stages of the service development lifecycle.
Load tests are randomly generated from weighted sets of messages and
expected responses. You select the message sets, the number of virtual
clients, ramp up time, test duration, and performance goals. Each time
a response is received, Load Check verifies the response and logs
performance data in the database.
To generate the maximum number of messages possible during a Load Check:
1) Use a commercial database such as Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle.
2) Increase the size of the connection pool your SOAPscope product
uses to access the database.
Do this by modifying the "maxActive" property
in the file colabContext.xml in <InstallDirectory>\tomcat\webapps\sos\WEB-INF. Be sure to make a backup copy of the file before you change it. Start
by changing the value of the "maxActive" property from 20 to 50. The
maximum possible number will depend on your hardware configuration, and
what your database can handle. There is approximately a 1-to-1
correlation between this value and the maximum number of clients you
can run at full speed. Each running test consumes an active connection
for the duration of the test. This means, if you have maxActive set to
50, and the number of clients is 100, at any moment, around 50 of the
clients can run while the other 50 are blocked waiting for a
connection.
3) Using a local database instead of a database across a network may
increase throughput, depending on your network access speed.
4) Start all the clients at the beginning of the Load Check, instead
of ramping up over time. Ramping up over time adds overhead that
reduces the total number of messages sent during a test.
5) Remember that you are running everything in a single Tomcat
instance. There is a limit to what that instance can handle, depending
on your system configuration. You may need multiple copies of SOAPscope
Tester or SOAPscope Server, to run Load Check simultaneously from
separate machines to achieve more virtual users than a single instance
of the product can support.
These recommendations should enable you to effectively test service
performance from the earliest stages of the service lifecycle! | | |
Testing Services  Within the world of SOA,
services are the building blocks, and are found at the lowest level of the
stack. Services become the base of a SOA, and while some are abstract
existing "legacy services," others are new and built for specific
purposes. Moving up the stack, we then find composite services, or
services made up of other services, and all services abstract up into the business
process or orchestration layer, which provides the agile nature of a SOA since
you can create and change solutions using a configuration metaphor. When
testing services, you need to keep the following in mind:
Services are not
complete applications or systems, and must be tested as such. They are a small part of an
application. Nor are they subsystems; they are small parts of subsystems
as well. Thus, you need to test them with a high degree of independence,
meaning that the services are both able to properly function by themselves, and
also as part of a cohesive system. Indeed, services are more analogous to
traditional application functions in terms of design and how they are leveraged
to form solutions, fine- or coarse-grained.
The best approach to
testing services is to list the use cases for those services. At that point you can design testing
approaches for that service including testing harnesses, or the use of SOA
testing tools (discussed later). You also need to consider any services
that the service may employ, and thus be tested holistically as a single
logical service. In some cases you may be testing a service that calls a
service, that calls a service, where some of the services are developed and
managed in house, and some of them exist on remote systems that you don't
control. All use cases and configurations must be considered.
Services should be
tested with a high degree of autonomy. They should execute without
dependencies, if at all possible, and be tested as independent units of code
using a single design pattern that fits within other systems which use many
design patterns. While all services can't be all things to all
containers, it's important to spend time understanding their foreseeable use,
and make sure those are built into the test cases. You should have the ability
to simulate services. Testers can build simulations of dependent services
to isolate a service under test. The tester uses SOAP messages and the
WSDL to "mock" the services at a live HTTP endpoint. Services should have the appropriate
granularity. Don't focus on
too-fine-grained or too-course-grained. Focus on that correct granularity
for the purpose and use within the SOA. Here the issues related to
testing are more along the lines of performance than anything else.
Too-fine-grained services have a tendency to bog down performance due to the
communications overhead required when dealing with so many services.
Too-loose-grained, they don't provide the proper autonomic values to support
their reuse. You need to work with the service designer on this issue.
Click to download a complete complimentary copy of "Key Strategies for SOA Testing" |
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