Understanding the SOAP Part of SOAPUI

 In this series of article, we will discuss on frequently asked question in Soap UI, we may know how to test using SOAP UI, but at times, we do not have answers when explaining what the terms in SOAP means.  In the first article in the series of  learning SOAPUI through Question/Answers, we will discuss on the SOA, What a WSDL is , what a SOAP is and how service provider , service User and UDDI are related for a SOAP Web Service

SOAP UI is used to test Web Services and SOA architecture, but many of us do not have words to explain what a web service is or what SOA architecture is. So the first question is what are SOA Architecture and Web Service.

Answer:  SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture. Application components provide services and interact with applications and other services through asynchronous message-based communication model in this architecture.

A service is a unit of work done by a service provider to achieve desired end results for a service consumer. SOAs are comprised of highly interoperable services. Web Service is a service that supports web standards. Web Services exposes the functionality and methods in WSDL format file. WSDL stands for Web Services description language.

Once a web services is created, it is published in the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) registry repository.

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is an XML-based protocol to exchange messages between a requester and a provider of a Web Service. This protocol specifies conventions for packaging a message and its processing rules.

SOAPUI uses the SOAP Protocol to access response for a request for a SOAP Web services request. To understand how SOAPUI works. There are WSDL available for web services on UDDI; SOAP protocol specifies conventions for packaging a message and its processing rules. For e.g.: there are Web Services available on the UDDI with exposed functionalities and methods in WSDL files for the end users of the web services. Using SOAP UI, we request for the methods. On executing the request, we get a response based on input in the request.