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1. What is soapUI?
soapUI is a standard desktop application adhering to established User Interface concepts for
Integrated Development Environments, as available in for example Eclipse, NetBeans and IDEA. Most
actions have keyboard shortcuts and tooltips, you should have no problems finding your way around.
soapUI makes heavy use of "Inspectors"; i.e. tabs that can be shown and hidden by selecting them.
soapUI is a free and open source desktop application for:
• inspecting Web Services
• invoking Web Services
• developing Web Services
• Web Services Simulation and Mocking
• Functional, Load and Compliance testing of Web Services
It is mainly aimed at developers and testers providing or consuming WSDL or REST based Web
Services (Java, .net, etc). Functional and Load Testing can be done both interactively in soapUI or within
an automated build or integration process using the soapUI command line tools.
Mock Web Services can easily be created for any WSDL and hosted from within soapUI or using the
command-line MockService runner. IDE-plugins are available for:
• eclipse plug in
• IntelliJ IDEA plug in
• NetBeans plug in
soapUI requires Java 1.5 and is licensed under the LGPL license.
Web Service Testing Projects
Any number of projects can be created in the current soapUI Workspace, either by creating new
ones (see below) or importing existing ones... A soapUI Project contains the following items in the
Navigator:
• A number of WSDL Interfaces corresponding to a SOAP/HTTP Binding for a defined PortType
• A number of REST Services optionally corresponding to a defined WADL
• A number of TestSuites containing TestCases for these Interfaces' Operations
• A number of MockServices containing Mock implementations of these Interfaces' Operations
soapUI projects are saved in a self contained xml file upon creation (as described above). This file
can be safely moved around, checked into CVS, sent by email, etc. There are a number of file-system
references possible in a project which will be resolved relatively to the current working directory or the
Resource Root (see below) unless they are specified as absolute paths. When obtaining an existing
soapUI project file, this can be added to the current workspace with the "Import Project" action on the
Workspace popup menu.
soapUI 2.5 introduces a "Resource Root" project level property that can be used to specify the root
folder for referenced files (attachments, properties, DataSink/DataSources, etc..). When specified, all
paths will be relativized to this folder and displayed as such.
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2. Internally, soapUI abstracts the actual nature of projects and their contained interfaces, tests, etc...
opening the possiblity of support for other service definitions or protocols than WSDL / SOAP (check out
the com.eviware.soapui.model package). Currently though, the only implementation for these interfaces is
for WSDL 1.1 and the SOAP/HTTP binding (as required by Basic Profile 1.0). Therefore, all actions and
functionality described will be in regard to this implementation.
Functional Testing of Web Services
You create a test from a WSDL by right-clicking the request and choosing "Add to TestCase". Once
you you have this in a TestCase the next natural step is doing functional test of it.
soapUI supports functional testing of Web Services by providing a TestCase metaphor where a
number of TestSteps can be executed in sequence. There are currently eleven types of TestSteps
available providing for rich testing possibilities. TestCases are further organized into TestSuites of which
an arbitrary number can be created within each project.
Functional Web Service testing in soapUI can be used for a variety of purposes:
• Unit testing: validate that each Web Service operation functions as stated
• Compliance testing: validate that the Web Service returns results compliant with its definition
• Process testing: validate that a sequence of web service invocations fulfill a required business
process
• Data Driven testing: validate that any of the above works as required with data input from external
sources (for example a database or another web service).
Web Service Load Testing
soapUI provides extensive load testing functionality allowing you to do the following:
• Functional LoadTesting : validate functionality under load using standard TestCase methods
• Behavioral LoadTesting : analyze performance behaviour under varying load with different load
strategies
• Performance LoadTesting : find maximal performance available using thread strategies and
Command Line LoadTest execution
• Requirements Driven LoadTesting : define performance requirements and continuously validate
using Load Test assertions
Any number of LoadTests can be created for a TestCase (using the TestCases "New LoadTest"
popup-menu action), each with different strategies, assertions, etc. to validate/assess a TestCases and
its TestSteps performance under different circumstances.
JMeter and soapUI Performance Comparison
A feature comparison will between the two tools will not be done in any detail, generally one could
say that JMeter is much better at load-testing in general (ie HTTP, JDBC, JMS, etc, etc) while soapUI is
better at load-testing web services specifically. Most things you can do with soapUI can probably be done
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3. in JMeter, but since JMeter has a more "generic" approach to almost everything, it won't always be as
"intuitive" as it is (or at least should be) in soapUI. On the other hand, many things that can be done in
JMeter are not possible in soapUI (for example distributed load testing).
In general one can say that Load Testing Web Services is extremely difficult since so many factors
can affect the measured results; network latency, host load, hardware, jvms, etc... Both soapUI and
JMeter will be a "victim" to this, although soapUI has slightly more options to control exactly what and how
results are to be measured (in the TestCase options dialog).
For more information look here:
http://www.soapui.org/userguide/loadtest/comparison.html
http://www.developer.com/open/article.php/10930_3839476_1/Tuning-and-Testing-Enterprise-Web-
Services-with-SoapUI-and-JMeter.htm
Known problems
If you are running more lengthy functional tests or load tests you might well bump into an
OutOfMemory error, which isn't what you want to see in the morning when you expected soapUI to pound
away at your services over the weekend.
There are several things that can be done to minimize the risk for running into this error –
http://www.eviware.com/blogs/oleblog/?p=17
All information taken from official web-site – http://www.soapui.org/
User guide and free soapUI version is here – http://www.soapui.org/userguide/index.html
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