2005-08-26

Messing with SOAP? Using Axis? Need to debug it?

I assume you have a client and a server and want to see the exact output? Don't go through the mess of configuring the SOAPMonitor, this doesn't show you the exact in/output, which obviously is a problem. Instead use plain and trusted standard Unix tools.

To view client output:

• Start netcat with "nc -l -p 8080". To save the output, append "|tee output"
• Run your client, pointing to port 8080

To view server output:

• Start your server, which listens to, say, port 8080
• Send your saved output to the server, like this: "cat output | nc localhost 8080"

You could also use a traffic dump, but this is easier to read.