Introduction

SOAP web services can be daunting most of the time, but life with a SOAP API can be made easier with a little help from SoapUI.

This nifty little open source tool is a mainstay for some developers working with web services.  SoapUI’s features include:

• Web service inspection of both SOAP & REST
• Web service development
• Web service simulation and mocking
• Functional and load testing
• The ability to invoke web services with instant feedback

Having spent the past decade involved on large enterprise integration projects (in both healthcare and automotive industries), I can vouch for the general sentiment that SOAP is too complex, too risky, and too costly for most integration projects. In fact, Google also came to the same conclusion years ago!

That said, when you are faced with no choice but to use SOAP-based web services, we recommend that you use SoapUI in conjunction with Iguana’s Translator to keep the good times rolling.

To demonstrate just how easy it can be, we’ve designed a simple tutorial that you can try out for yourself. In this example, we will use both SoapUI and the Translator to create a simple temperature conversion web service.