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Month: March 2011

Web service testing with soapUI

In my previous post regarding Spring-WS and Security I didn’t mention anything about testing the resulting SOAP service. Particularly when it comes to secure services, it’s vitally important to test. First, we want to make sure that the service is functionally correct – that it returns the correct results. Second, we want to make sure it is secure – that it refuses service to any request that does not meet our security requirements.

With regard to how we test, it’s simplest to use some SOAP editor tool that lets us fiddle with the request and press a button to retest instantly. But ideally we want some programmatic test that can be included in the test phase of our build.

This post describes testing the now legendary Spanners WS demo with the following requirements:

  1. Tests must be functional – they test what the webservice does
  2. Security is tested
  3. Tests can be tweaked and rerun instantly
  4. Tests can be included in build process

The updated source of the Spanners WS demo including the tests described here is available to download.

Rounded corners in CSS / IE Tester

Until Internet Explorer 8 is finally retired we still have to dick about with CSS to make IE behave properly. I’m not a CSS hacker but this is one trick that I suspect I’ll need again at least until IE9 becomes standard.

CSS3 includes a property for rounded corners which was (sort of) adopted in Firefox, Chrome and Safari some time ago. I don’t use it on this site – someone else did the hard work there using images for the corners. Presumably because CSS3 support was so poor at the time. This new CSS3 property can however be retrofitted to old browsers with a little work.