Web Service Engine for Accelerating SOA System Development (hereafter referred to as "SOA Accelerator") is a toolkit that allow transformation on various schema formats such as XSD, WSDL, Microsoft® Excel, Cobol copybook, XML, etc. This toolkit enables users to generate various formats of request data based on these schemas with only a few clicks of the mouse. SOA Accelerator provides a mutable, tree-based, user-friendly perspective and interface for working on WSDL, XSD, and other schema files. This toolkit incorporates an on-the-fly capability for generating XML/SOAP requests.

SOA Accelerator comes packed with a highly customizable, built-in stubbing engine for transports such as MQ, TibcoEMS, HTTP, and JMS. The toolkit also provides functions for driving data messages over these transports, and it enables the user to post requests over JMS (with custom header data) and over HTTP with attachments and custom headers. The toolkit allows for various levels in customizing the resulting SOAP/XML/CSV/fixed-length data and validates the generated output files. (The data comes from user-defined properties files and user input, as well as being randomly generated by an internal data engine.)

SOA Accelerator incorporates a resilient element generation engine that resolves some recursive element generation and other syntactic problems that similar software cannot handle. The toolkit can generate test data in legacy formats and can reverse-engineer legacy data to XML and other user-friendly formats. The toolkit includes functions for transforming legacy data structures and specification files to XSDs and XMLs, which can be readily used in Web services.

The toolkit includes various functions for transforming schemas in a batch mode to any desirable target schema or data files. These functions include bulk data file generation and transformation of any input schema format into generic elemental tree representation. This transformation allows on-the-fly target format generation and provides an easy way to enhance the toolkit for further schema formats. The toolkit runs on Windows® and can be configured to run on UNIX® and Linux®. It provides a user-friendly interface that helps XML-unaware testers and business analysts to quickly generate schemas.

How does it work?

SOA Accelerator takes WSDL, XSD, or a COBOL copybook as an input file and generates operation/schema structure for these files. The toolkit allows the user to perform various transformations of data and format on these generated structures.

The schema structure is represented using Mutable TreeNodes in order to ease navigation and provide a user-friendly means of entering various parameters for schema elements. When ready, a user can perform transformations such as generating SOAP, XML, fixed-length, and CSV formats with various data source options for the schema elements. SOA Accelerator incorporates a sophisticated data generation engine that generates data in the following manner, based on criteria given by the user:

1. The engine obtains data from properties files.
2. It obtains data from XML files.
3. It generates data randomly (in some cases based on the regular expression specified in the schema).
4. It obtains data entered by the user in the interface.

The software allows the user to reverse-engineer a fixed-length or CSV data file: It allows modification of the contents in a user-friendly way and then transformation back into XML or any other relevant format.

SOA Accelerator has built-in SOAP over HTTP and JMS Stub servers and drivers that enable the user to simultaneously stub applications and post messages to the application.

Soundararajan Velu is an IT architect from IBM Global Business Services (GBS). He works as an integration architect in the SOA/Web services area and is an active member of the Virtual Universe community at IBM. During the past six years, Mr. Velu has been working with IBM and the software industry on the EAI design and architecture of complex telecom applications. He holds a computer science and engineering degree with distinction from VT University, India.

Aveekshith Bushan is a project manager with IBM GBS; he handles a critical, SOA-based mediation application of an Australian telecom major. Over the last eight years at IBM, Mr. Bushan has worked for various telecom and finance projects in GBS and has done consulting work for IBM software labs. He has a computer engineering degree and is currently pursuing an MBA from IIMB.