SoapUI is a tool for Testing Web Service; these can be the SOAP Web Services as well RESTful Web Services or HTTP based services. SoapUI is an Open Source and completely free tool.

Cactus, from the Apache Jakarta project, extends Junit in order to test server side code. The cactus framework is targeted at so called “integration unit testing” but it can be used for unit testing as well. The Cactus framework also for a client test case to invoke server side Java classes, JSPs and EJBs.

An alternative to Cactus, for server side testing, this framework allows for EJB tests to be executed, prior to the full application being available. JBoss examples are given as well as testing entity beans.

This short article, with code that can be downloaded, steps through how to write your own test harness in VS.NET. What we like about this extensive article I that it leads the reader through the steps needed to create a browser enabled Web Services test harness in c#. With such a test harness (browser based), other automated tools (such as Selenium) can be used to drive the tests.

The website does offer open source downloads, but this is one of those sites where services and commercial licenses are also offered. There is a form to request pricing information on TestMaker licenses. That said, there does seem to be a lot of useful tools and advice freely available. What catches our eye is the multipurpose, functional and performance testing, aspects of TestMaker together with an emphasis on SOA.

Written in Java, HttpUnit emulates the relevant portions of browser behavior, including form submission, Javascript basic http authentication, cookies and automatic page redirection, and allows Java test code to examine returned pages either as text, an XML DOM, or containers of forms, tables, and links. When combined with a framework such as Junit it is fairly easy to write tests that very quickly verify the functioning of a web

It can be used to test individual system components that have HTTP interfaces (JSP, ASP, CGI, PHP, AJAX, Servlets, HTML Forms, XML/SOAP Web Services, REST, etc), and can be used as a test harness to create a suite of [HTTP level] automated functional, acceptance, and regression tests.

This test harness is targeted at C++ users, typically Microsoft. There are extensive memory leak detection capabilities and other features targeted at the C environment.