those fine gentlemen at Mindreef have finally shipped Soapscope1.0: http://www.mindreef.com/, a product which has a definate place in the arsenal of anyone doing full time web service development.
For those of you who havent used it, it is a persistent logging proxy with a pseudocode view of the payloads, and the ability to modify and resend messages. My favourite feature is that it also has a network sniffer, so you can log SOAP messages on a lan without having to set up proxy information to bind to Soapscope. This is very slick, as you can start logging an ongoing system, or put the log up near your server (on a hub not a switch, of course), and track all inbound calls. Highly recommended; only $99. Which brings up an interesting discussion topic: what are the best tools out there for doing web service dev? So far I use jedit: xml editing, build file editing Intellij idea 3.0: java code xml spy 4.2: XSD editing, ad hoc SOAP calls (demos and tests) soapscope: to see what is going on ant: building and testing capeclear WSDL editor powerpoint: making claims about wonderful everything will be vs.net for the C# side of things, and database design. Are there others I need to have? I see that xmlspy 5.0 is out but cant motivate myself to spend the money for a tool I only use intermittently. Thoughts? -steve
