Load Testing SOAs Which Utilize Web Services

Overview

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), despite being a hot topic, are far from new. In the recent past, Microsoft's Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) and the Object Management Group's Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) represented the state-of-the-art in SOA for intranet implementations, but their inherent complexities have hampered their adoption on the internet. What is new is the migration of SOA onto the web. Internet is dominated by the use of web browsers; therefore the logical path for SOA on the web is to adopt the technologies used by browsers. The web services implementation that is almost ubiquitous is the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). It is a combination of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) standards and the web's underlying network protocol, the HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP).