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Sripathi Acharya

Web Service Mocker

Web Service Mocker is an easy to use, completely web based SOAP web service simulator. This utility is found very useful in a SOA development environment during unit test, preliminary acceptance test, component integration test, regression test and non functional requirement test phases of any project.

Reasons for use

In a test environment, mocked services can simulate the behavior of complex, real (non-mock) service and are therefore useful when a real service is impractical or impossible to incorporate into a test.

Why not soapUI?

soapUI is a powerful testing tool which also provides mocking facility. The following are the few reasons why this utility is useful over soapUI for web service mocking.

  • soapUI is not web based - With this utility a tester/developer can mock a service, change a mocked service easily using any web browser.
  • soapUI is not centralized - With this utility all mocked services will be visible for everyone connected over network. No installation required on each machine.
  • soapUI is for technical people - To mock a web service in soapUI, which can generate a selective response for a particular request requires knowledge of XPATH, to generate delayed mocking requires knowledge of groovy scripting.
  • soapUI is WSDL dependent - Everything in soapUI starts with a WSDL, if you want to mock a service without WSDL it is not possible in soapUI.

Software Requirement

Installation

Place the war file under (tomcat-root)/webapps directory and start the tomcat server.

Usage

Once the tomcat server is started the web page will be available at http://host:port/context/index.jsp

Ex: If the war name is webservicemocker-0.0.1.war and port is 8080 the web URL will be http://localhost:8080/webservicemocker-0.0.1/index.jsp

Technical details

Web Service Mocker is a simple web application.

  • Core engine is a simple Servlet. This Servlet dispatches the desired response based on end point URL and request parameter
  • Front end is a set of JSPs
  • soapUI API (3.5) is used to import WSDLs, validate schema and generate skeleton SOAP messages
  • SAAJ API is used for generic web service test client
  • Log4j API for logging