March 18, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Test Center Tracker: Web services tied and tested

TAGS: Mashups, SOA, SOA, SOA testing

Free mashups: Built on an Apache Axis2-based application server, the WSO2 Mashup Server (in its 1.0 debut) lets you stitch together Web services, Atom, RSS, HTML, and other data sources, and share them with your inner or outer circle. Mashup Server is completely, 100 percent, absolutely free and open source, with support available from the company starting at $2,000 per server per year. Steven Nunez has the review; this would be the same Steven Nunez who brought us the review of WSO2's "lightweight, fast, and free" Enterprise Service Bus 1.0 in November.

LISA fakes it: As a SOAP test tool, iTKO's LISA 3.6e was not as easy to use, as rich in Web service testing features, or as nicely documented as Parasoft's SOAtest 5.1 or Crosscheck's SOAPSonar 3.0.5, as per Rick Grehan in his November 2007 roundup. LISA 4.0 rebounds with a cool virtualization capability that allows QA folks to quickly and easily create simulated Web services for testing. Plus, LISA is hardly limited to SOAP or even RESTful Web services, but also provides tools for testing Web apps, Java applications, JMS systems, and enterprise service buses. See Rick Grehan's review of LISA 4.0 here; you'll find his November comparison of AdventNet's QEngine, Crosscheck's SOAPSonar, iTKO's LISA, Mindreef's SOAPscope Server, and Parasoft's SOAtest here.

Three free and fabulous Web service test tools: LISA and the other commercial tools allow users to test Web services without having to muck around in the XML. For users with a technical command of XML, SOAP, and WSDL, a freebie can take you further than you might think. Check out Rick's comparative look at Eviware SoapUI, PushToTest TestMaker, and WebInject from last May.

Posted by Doug Dineley on March 18, 2008 06:00 AM