New SmartBear Plug In for SoapUI Pro Provides Support for Apiary’s API Blueprint

SmartBear Software has released a new plug-in for SoapUI Pro that provides support for Apiary’s API Blueprint service descriptions within the tool.

Apiary, designers of the API Blueprint and the Apiary API Design toolchain, enables parallel API development through collaboration and documentation. SmartBear, makers of SoapUI Pro, provides developers and testers common tooling to test mock services and APIs. 

SoapUI Pro's new plug-in architecture makes extending the tool faster and easier. The plug-in framework uses annotation-based extension points instead of XML configuration files and provides automatic installation of any third-party dependencies. SoapUI Pro offers a plug-in browser so SoapUI Pro users are able to find and install plug-ins.

SoapUI is platform agnostic, and can be used for Web Services created with .NET, J2EE, Perl, PHP, etc. The only requirements on a Web Service are that they have a defining WSDL, that they are bound with the SOAP/HTTP binding, and that they do not use SOAP-Encoding (to facilitate validations).

- Mocking lets developers write Service Tests before the service is created, providing the ability to add the tests to an automation environment during the development process. This is a useful technique both for developers who are coding areas relying on APIs that haven't been completed yet, and also for testers who are building their tests while coding is ongoing. Service Mocking is a core capability needed for Test Driven Development.

- The REST Discovery feature allows developers to capture REST traffic by using the service through a browser or client. After recording, developers can view the traffic log and filter it for traffic type according to their needs. It also provides the opportunity to manually select groups of requests or single instances and convert them into services for use in a project as well as to use these services to create mock services.