Automated testing web services

[Antonio Rafael Rodrigues]

Hello ranchers ...

I'm having difficult trying to decide about the best approach to build an application to automate webservices tests.
The system under tests exposes a number of webservices that are not so easy to have its behavior validated, the tests need to inject some data and execute assertion on many fields of the SOAP response.
Actually I'm between "three" approaches: SOAPUI (free), pure java (with wiremock and Junit oriented) or something else.
On one hand, know that SOAPUi is specially designed to help with this kind of job, but I think it's a bit confusing to work with (mainly its free version), and all my team would have to learn how to use it properly.
On the other hand, I'm afraid that make everything "from scratch" in java could be extreme.
Additionally, I think that I could have more options beyond these two, but I don't have any other ideas.

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

[Junilu Lacar]

Web services can be viewed as a delivery mechanism, i. e.. plumbing. As such I tend not to test that layer with automated tests. I might have one simple test to check that I'm getting back a response but as far as full functionality, I prefer to test at the component level, where my code meets the web service infrastructure. In other words, I test the POJO that the WS uses to get results and trust that the web service infrastructure, the plumbing, works.