Mindreef

By Peter Varhol
April, 2008

...Testing Web services and their accompanying infrastructures is surprisingly difficult and complex, and because of the nature of the interfaces and XML definitions, it can't be done with your existing development and testing tools. This is where SOAPscope Server from Mindreef comes in. Mindreef spent several years supplying developers with its original SOAPscope SOAP debugger at a nominal price, and then followed up on that tool with a comprehensive team-based approach to Web services quality.

Today, SOAPscope Server is role-based, with separate but complementary offerings for services architects, developers and testers. The centerpiece is SOAPscope Server itself, which ties together the other versions so that team members are sharing test assets and results.

An especially nice feature is the ability to simulate the behavior of the target Web service for your tests. This addresses the problem of not being able to test your interfaces until the service itself is complete. Rather than wait until the last minute, you can pretend that a functional service is on the other side of your SOAP listener, and move forward with interface testing.

From my own experience, it's actually pretty easy to write a simple Web services interface and SOAP listener. But it gets complicated fast, and without security, policy enforcement and a host of other interface standards, your Web service will never make it out of the lab. SOAPscope Server helps you ensure that it does.

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