For a while I’ve been looking for a decent open source tool to test web services, without much luck. There are a number of commercial tools, including Parasoft’s SOAtest, but I struggled to find any open source equivalents. A few days ago I stumbled upon soapui, which is a GPLd web service testing and prototyping tool. It’s written in Java and should work on any operating system with a Java VM.

My initial impressions of version 1.5 are good – it had no problem importing the WSDL file for the project I’m currently working on (consuming a custom .NET web service) and allowing me to test it.

One small installation issue – if you have problems running bin/soapui.sh, it may be because the file contains carriage returns. Strip them out and it should work fine.