Thursday, July 02, 2009

[Tech] Monitor your WS calls

If you develop applications, which consumes web services from other applications or integration platforms, debugging can often be very deflating. If you don't use the correct debugging tools, you don't see the generated SOAP messages which are delivered between the parties.

A very useful tool is the Open Source SOAP monitoring tool from predic8. The tool does the same as the TCP monitor from Axis, but provides a more user friendly UI and more settings and features:
  • Monitoring of SOAP and HTTP messages
  • Rule based SOAP routing
  • XML formatting and syntax highlighting for SOAP messages
  • Interception and modification of messages
  • HTTP chunking
  • HTTP 1.1
  • Loading and saving of configurations
  • Rich graphical User Interface
  • Resending of messages
The monitor acts as a proxy. Therefore your client application must send the SOAP/HTTP messages to the proxy monitor, which delegates the messages to the real endpoint. A Quick Starter Guide is also available.

[Pub] Mule Tutorial

In the current issue of the Java Magazin I published a tutorial to develop loose coupled systems with Mule. The tutorial illustrates the usage of an Enterprise Service Bus in an airport domain, where different airport systems communicate with each other over the ESB. In the example I use a set of important Enterprise Integration Patterns and show how these patterns are implemented in Mule. Some patterns I used are:
  • Event Driven Consumer
  • Content Based Router
  • Filter
  • Transformation
  • Message Splitter
The transports and connectors I used from Mule are:
  • JMS (Active MQ as message broker)
  • Quartz Transport
  • File Transport
  • XMPP transport for instant messaging
The source code of the tutorial can be downloaded here.

Have Fun!