Lightweight alternative to soapui?

Question

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.

Answer 1

Have you already tried tcptrace?

Answer 2

If you aren't opposed to doing a little scripting, I've used Suds. 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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Storm

http://storm.codeplex.com/

Simple and lightweight. Cool.

Answer 5

Try

Membrane SOAP Client

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

Answer 6

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, but simply a SOAP client library 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 and XQuery 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.