Web application for interoperability testing of web services

Abstract

The web services technology has been created to support communication between heterogeneous platforms. Despite its maturity, built upon more than a decade of experience, research and practice show that the technology still fails to connect the two sides of an interaction, even when the platforms involved are the same. This is especially concerning for providers, as a failure in the inter-operation of web services can bring in disastrous consequences for the services involved, which frequently support businesses. In this paper we present WitWS, an on-line web application designed to test the interoperability of a web service against specific client-side platforms. The tool is able to test not only the pre-runtime steps involving code generation, but also the end-to-end runtime communication present in a web service interaction with a client. WitWS has been used to test a set of web services deployed on Glassifsh and WildFly against the well-known Metro JAX-WS, JBossWS, and Axis2 client platforms and was able to disclose severe interoperability issues.