Introduction to web services simulation with SOAPSimulator: A hands-on tutorial

Typically, companies embark on SOA projects for system-to-system integration within their corporate domains as well as with external trading partners. Re-usable services are the cornerstone of a successful SOA implementation. In a SOA Project, once a producer service is built, developers can subsequently start implementing consumer services and tester can begin building test scenarios. If the producer service is under development and is not available for request-response interaction, development and QA teams are severely hampered in their ability to develop consumer code. Service simulation – the ability to mimic producer services even before they are implemented – enables consumer developers and testers to parallelize their efforts without having to wait for service implementation to complete. Service simulation also enables corporations to provide a portable alternative to building an expensive reference environment.

In this hands-on tutorial, we are going to learn service simulation techniques using SOAPSimulator™ from Crosscheck Networks.

SCENARIO AND SETUP OVERVIEW
The setup for this tutorial captures a real-life SOA development scenario where a producer web services has to be developed and deployed as shown in the figure below. A service, Factorial(int n), meant to compute the factorial of a number, n, is first designed. In this design phase, the interface stub of this service, with clear inputs and outputs, is defined in C# using .NET Web Matrix. The WSDL written or generated in the design phase is handed over to the testing team that imports this WSDL into SOAPSimulator used for service simulation. Through an easy-to-use, simple point-and-click interface, SOAPSimulator is configured for simulated SOAP request-response pairs. The simulation for the Factorial service is then started on port 8000 as show in the figure below.

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