There are times when you need a “raw” SOAP client to see the exact messages being sent to and from a Soap Sever. This is especially important for developers who are hosting a soap server for an API. In my example, PHP was throwing an error, but I couldn’t see exactly what it was. The Soap for Ecplise uses XSLT to parse a soap message into a readable format, but because the PHP error was breaking the XML formatting, Eclipse just told me that it couldn’t parse, but wouldn’t show me the raw message.
This was very infurriating. I couldn’t figure out how to see the error. I did some googling and found this post by Chris McMahon about SOAP test tool. It talked about soapUI, a java project, and its ability to commicate with SOAP and show you the raw message back. Within minutes of downloading the installer I had set up my WSDL, sent a message, and knew exactly what the problem was. It a nice finding a simple, straight forward program. I recommend it to any SOAP developer.
Justin Carmony 
Yes..soapui is interesting..but if all you wanted was to look at the raw messages, you might as well have gone for WireShark or Ethereal
LikeLike
Thanks for the nod. I did that work some time ago, but I learned an enormous amount about SOAP during that time.
LikeLike