Java Web Services

Other Interoperability Resources

Given the importance of interoperability to the future of web services, it shouldn’t be surprising that many other developers and corporations have created useful resources. In this section, we’ll look at a few of them. Simon Fell has developed a web site where developers can post their servers and clients. If a server implementation is updated, the notification service is called automatically and runs a registered test suite to verify interoperability. Registering for notifications when server or client updates are posted is also possible.

Several vendors, such as Iona, Borland, and HP, offer interoperability test facilities on their web sites. These sites provide client- and server-side implementations of the interoperability labs for testing. Iona also offers a site that features its daily build for interoperability testing.

Microsoft SOAP Toolkit 3.0 Interoperability Test Site

Microsoft offers a SOAP 1.1 message validator to test interoperability (see Section 9.6). However, it is fairly limited and does not support encoding (either Section 5 or user-defined), external schema validation, or service description support.

Microsoft differentiates between conformance and validation and offers this tool as a SOAP message validation tool. In contrast, a conformant SOAP message “does not violate any of the sections in its specification, and therefore ensures the highest degree of interoperability with vendor implementations that also conform to the same ...