The primary objective of designing testing tools is to assist people in testing software by reducing the time taken by test execution. There are different types of tools which can be used for functional and non-functional testing. Some of the tools are designed to automate user interface based interactions and some are used to derive various types of requests messages automatically and transmit them to applications with or without modifications. Some tools support both of these aspects.
soapUI is a tool which can be used for both functional and non-functional testing. It is not limited to web services, though it is the de-facto tool used in web services testing. In web services testing, soapUI is capable of performing the role of both client and service. It enables users to create functional and non-functional tests quickly and in an efficient manner by using a single environment.
The first release of soapUI (v1.0) was in October 2005. Ole Lensmer, while working in a project related to SOA, felt the need for a testing tool to support agile development. Therefore, he started to develop soapUI in his spare time. Eventually, the project was open sourced and the community grew. Ever since, a number of versions have been released with various new features and enhancements and the newest version of soapUI is 4.0.1 at the time of writing this book.
The originator of soapUI, Ole Lensmer was managing the project releases through a company called Eviware for the past few years. In July 2011, Eviware was acquired by SmartBear Software (http://smartbear.com/) and now soapUI is part of SmartBear Software.
soapUI is a free and open source utility, which means you can utilize the various features provided by the tool freely as well as you are allowed to make modifications to the source code of soapUI and suit it according to your requirements. soapUI is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). It has been implemented purely using Java platform hence it runs on most operating systems out of the box.
It should be noted that soapUI is also distributed as a non-free commercial version known as soapUI Pro, which basically provides users with custom utilities and enhanced production level testing capabilities. All our discussions and examples are based on the free version of soapUI for your convenience.