Monitor SOAP messages

While developing Web Services at times one has to look for what is going out and coming in during web service interaction. Eclipse has a built-in TCP/IP Monitor but somehow I did not have a good experience using it.

Apache SOAP project has small utility called TCP Tunnel/Monitor, which is available here. TCP Tunnel/Monitor can be started using follwing command-

set CLASSPATH=%CLASSPATH%;./soap.jar;
java org.apache.soap.util.net.TcpTunnelGui 80 localhost 8080

Here first option 80 is the port where TcpTunnel will listen on your machine (localhost). The second parameter is the target address (the local machine in this case). The final parameter 8080 is the port where it will forward the calls to desired server as specified in 2nd parameter.

The TCP Tunnel/Monitor application is really just a simple proxy application that includes a visual interface to view the request response XML. TCP Tunnel/Monitor will display a window with two text areas:




* The text area on the left shows the request.
* The text area on the right shows the response received from the target server.