Using NetTool
Neil O’Toole, Technology Evangelist @ Cape Clear
Updated March 27th, 2002
Background
One of the main selling points of web services is their supposed simplicity. Take SOAP, the protocol used to invoke web services. Daunting as a SOAP message may initially appear, it is still human-readable. If you examine a message, you can easily pick out the operation name, the types and values of the parameters, and so on. This is in contrast to most previous protocols, for example the CORBA “IIOP” protocol, which are in a compact binary format (and therefore unintelligible to most mortals). But a SOAP message is basically text (hence the Simple in SOAP), and this has some advantages for the developer. The first advantage we’ve already mentioned: a raw SOAP message can be read and understood by the developer. The second advantage is that it is possible to manually edit and send SOAP messages. NetTool is a utility that makes it very easy to do both these things.
NetTool consists of two distinct tools:
* Tunnel Monitor – used to monitor SOAP messages between client and web service
* HTTP Sender – used to transmit SOAP documents (or any other document)
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