[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.