Three and a half years ago, when Parasoft first launched SOAPtest, there were very few large scale production Web services in deployment, David McCaw, Manager of Web Services Solutions for Parasoft explained to SYS-CON.TV (http://www.sys-con.tv) in an interview at Web Services Edge 2005 about the remarkable success story that Parasoft has been in the Web services testing space, following on from its preeminence in the Java testing market where Jtest has flourished from its inception to Jtest 6.0 which was released in conjunction with Web Services Edge 2005 in Boston. 

"By having a product commercially available at that time," he continued, "we were able to align ourselves with some of the large early adopters and build a strategy that's supportive not just to the individual developer but to the enterprise as a whole and to build a testing platform robust enough to support an entire SOA initiative within the enterprise rather than just being a point solution. That's what gives us our competitive edge."

View David McCaw With Jeremy Geelan Live on SYS-CON.TV 

"SOAPtest allows users to verify all aspects of a Web service, from WSDL validation, to unit and functional testing of the client and server, to performance testing. SOAPtest addresses key Web service issues such as interoperability, security, change management, and scalability," McCaw explained.

"Because of its flexible nature," he continued, "SOAPtest is an ideal choice for development engineers and QA professionals alike."

Its unit tests, McCaw noted, can be leveraged into scenario-based tests, as well as load tests, without any additional scripting or re-inventing of the wheel.

"By utilizing SOAPtest throughout the software development lifecycle, users can prevent errors, improve quality and reliability, and accelerate the time to market for their Web service initiatives."

Now that Web services by nature are being run for mission-critical IT functions or for revenue-generating B2B exchanges, companies need to know that their Web services are going to be sufficiently robust and stand up in the production environment. SOAPtest is precisely the right product at the right time, because 2005, according to McCaw, is "absolutely" going to be the year of web services.

View David McCaw With Jeremy Geelan Live on SYS-CON.TV