Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Using
Publicly
Available
Web
Services
to
Test
Against
Problem
You want to eliminate a few variables in the complex world of web services development by
using an existing, established WSDL for a real web service to test against. This will allow you
to just on the client part for now.
Solution
Use some of the publicly available free web services from places like StrikeIron.com or
XMethods.com.
Here are a few places you can look to find WSDLs to run your test clients against:
Web Service X
eb Service X
This is a pretty good place to start. Their web services are free, have some documentation,
require no signup, and are very simple and straightforward to invoke. Moreover, they
are written in .NET, so you will be experiencing the real benefit of web services (and
encountering some of the rough edges) right off the bat. Try them out at ht-
tp://www.webservicex.net .
StrikeIron.com
If you supply your email address, you can invoke a service five times. If you do a full re-
gistration, you get 25 times; after that, they'll want you to purchase the service. Note that
StrikeIron is not a test bed, and that they make money by having developers and organiz-
ations purchase their services for production use. They have real implementations behind
them and do real work, such as figuring out the geocode (latitude and longitude) of a cer-
tain address. But the services here are real-world with non-trivial interfaces that require
passing license info in headers, and the schemas define many composite objects. All of
this can make StrikeIron rather tough to start out with. A sample StrikeIron.com service
documentation page is shown in Figure 4-2 .
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