Web Services Testing with soapUI: Starting with an overview of SOA and web services testing, this guide take you through a number of hands-on exercises and projects to get you familiar with soapUI. A sure way to raise the quality of your web services.

Our project will be based on a hypothetical Hotel Reservation System, which is targeted for use by an administrative staff of a hotel. The system consists of three basic functions as follows:

Let's look at the high level architecture of the sample hotel reservation application that we are going to discuss in this chapter:

The hotel reservation system comprises of three fundamental entities; Guest, Room, and Reservation. Each guest is identified by name, address, and age. The rooms are identified by room number, room type, and room size. A room reservation is done by assigning a guest to a room.

We are not going to make our project too complicated since our focus is to derive a set of web services for testing with soapUI in the next chapters. Therefore, we deliberately omit some interrelationships between these entities. For example, we assume that a guest can do only one reservation at a time.

Before starting to implement the project, let's make the project environment ready.

Our sample hotel reservation system is implemented using SOAP-based web services. As per the three basic entities used in the system, we can plan to have three web services explained as follows:

As we have seen under Designing the web services section, we are going to use three different web services to handle the guest, room, and reservation management functions. We have also discussed that three MySQL tables are used to store information in each of these web services. Let's put together all these elements and start to implement our system.

First, we should define the guest, room, and reservation Java beans which are used as data transferring objects in our system.

The complete source of all Java bean classes can be found at src\com\sample\reservation\dto folder of the code bundle.

Though we developed all the Java classes included in our sample hotel reservation system, we have not made them web services yet. In other words, still, our three web service implementation classes cannot be invoked by a web service client, such as soapUI. In this section, we make a deployable artifact so that we can deploy the services in a service container such as Apache Axis2.

There are multiple ways of deploying a web service in the Apache Axis2 SOAP engine. We will use the service archive-based deployment mechanism where we create a deployable archive with all service artifacts and copy that into the Axis2 server's deployment folder. In this mechanism, the deployable artifact is known as an Axis2 Archive (aar).

In order to deploy an Axis2 service as an aar file, a deployment descriptor should be included with it. The Axis2 deployment descriptor is known as services.xml and must be placed inside the META-INF folder of the aar file. The services.xml tells the Axis2...

We dedicated this chapter to create a sample project, which used a few web services to implement a simple hotel room reservation system. We started from scratch and created three Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs). Then we exposed them as web services by deploying in Apache Axis2. These three web services, namely GuestManagementService, RoomManagementService, and ReservationService will be used throughout this book. All our discussions of soapUI will be based on these services. Hence, even if you did not follow the sample project, it is advisable to download WebServicesSample-Deliverable.zip from http://www.PacktPub.com/support, follow the instructions given in README.txt to deploy HotelReservation.aar on Apache Axis2, and get the services ready to try out the soapUI samples which we will discuss in the next chapters.