Wise GUI 1.0.1 additions

Wise core 2.0.1 and Wise webgui 1.0.1 have just been released!
The core comes with a couple of interesting new features which I introduced in the previous posts: detyped contract browsing / endpoint invocation and request message preview. This post will hence show the nice additions that webgui has just got :-)

The request parameter panel is now a multi-tab panel:

in particular the "Options" tab allows setting:

• the username / password to be used for the actual invocation (might be different from the wsdl retrieval ones)
• an override value for the target endpoint address (which is useful for quickly testing different endpoints conforming to the same wsdl contract)

Moreover, it's possible to get a popup window showing a preview of the SOAP request message that would be created and sent for the currently provided request parameters (no message actually goes on the wire):

Finally, should the user be interested in having a look at the actual SOAP response message that has been received upon invocation, the "View message" button shows it in another popup window:

I believe the 1.0.1 additions should further expand the set of Wise GUI usage scenarios; you can download the latest version, have a try and feel free to provide feedback :-)

Further improvements are planned for next release, possibly including a major UI change for allowing user management, so stay tuned...

Writing a SOAP message preview tool

Previous post introduced a new tree view of request parameters for invoking an endpoint. Here I'd like to show an example of a practical usage of such addition to Wise core: a customized SOAP message preview tool.
There're few scenarios in which a user needs to know how a SOAP message for invoking a given WSDL operation will look like. Computing that can be easy or difficult, depending on the complexity of the contract (number of schemas, wsdl style, etc.), that's why resorting to leveraging tools is actually a good idea ;-)

Using Wise, we start by building a WSDynamicClient instance consuming our target wsdl and selecting the WSMethod to use (here we already knew the service, port and operation names):
then it's time to create an ElementBuilder as follows:
please note we're setting the request flag (given we're building the tree for request parameters) and we disable default value generation for leaf elements (as we want to provide custom default values and do not want elements from schema sequences to default to null).
The builder is used to build up the request trees (one for each method parameter):
the populateElement method is where we customize the tree according to our scenario needs:
as you can see, we don't want null elements [A], we set default values for leaves [B], we add one element for each array/collection [C] and run a single cycle of lazy element expansion [D] (cyclic element type references in the schemas are converted into lazy load elements in the tree).
In this case, the default values are set in quite a dirty way in getDefaultValue(Class cl), basically we check provided class and return a "?" for String, zero for any numerical type, "1970-01-01T00:00:00.000Z" for XMLGregorianCalendar and an empty string otherwise.
Once the tree is available, getting the actual parameter objects to perform the invocation with is a matter of calling toObject() on each tree root element:
And finally, the message preview is written to a provided output stream as follows:
That's all!
You can have a look at the whole code in the MessagePreviewIntegrationTest I've recently added to the current Wise core 2.0.1-SNAPSHOT. Any feedback / comment is welcome!

And if you're wondering how this is currently implemented, well, you know Wise basically uses JAXWS tooling from JBossWS to generate a compliant ws client; the Wise model is built by parsing the generated client and the tree view is derived from the model. The message preview flow is pretty similar to the invocation one, except a special jaxws handler is installed in the client in order for writing down the SOAP message generated by the internal ws stack (Apache CXF here); the handler also stops the handler chain execution so that no message actually goes to wire and Wise early return the message preview.

As previously explained, delegating to a fully compliant WS stack here, ensure correctness of the messages, even of their preview ;-)

Detyped WS contract browsing and endpoint invocation

In response to some good feedback received from the community after the recent 2.0 release, I've been enriching the API of Wise Core to further simplify ws testing using it.
Till now the Wise core API has fundamentally been based on the WSEndpoint, WSMethod, WebParameter abstraction:
A given WSDL contract is mapped to at least one WSEndpoint instance having one or more WSMethod instances. Each WSMethod can have multiple WebParameter objects depending on the WSDL operation signature. By inspecting the type information in WebParameter instances, the user is meant to build the actual objects to be passed as arguments to WSMethod:invoke(Object args). While effective, this might turn out to be not very practical and easy (due to reflection, see here) if the consumed WSDL contract is complex and includes multiple nested schema types.
It's well known that Wise core supports Smooks transformations, with the sake of allowing conversion of existing application data models into the object structure required for performing the invocation. However that's not really helping a lot when the target is programmatically testing a given endpoint.
In particular some users expressed the interest in the tree view offered by the Wise GUI on top of the core model: similarly to what is shown in the GUI, a tree model (think about e.g. the DOM tree approach) could be provided to describe each parameter type of a given WSMethod. Each element of the tree would allow getting children and setting values (for leaves only). So here is what I came up with: The current Wise core 2.0.1-SNAPSHOT features an implementation of the Element interface above, as well as a builder implementation for converting a WebParameter into an Element tree:
The end result is in a really simplified contract browsing of a WS endpoint as well as simple invocation (see the integration test here too):
The tree view can of course be used to convert and access the data returned in the InvocationResult instance.
Please note how the parameters type info is completely hidden to the user, who basically ends up setting string values for leaves elements. Strings are parsed into proper primitives (and wrappers) depending on the actual parameter type. Wise default Element impl is currently able to convert values to String, Character, all numerical types, QName, XMLGregorianCalendar and Duration classes.
So, leveraging Wise, a user can invoke / test an endpoint by browsing its contract and setting parameters in a fully dynamic and detyped way, while still being sure the generated SOAP request is compliant with the contract requirements and constraints.

The additions described above are currently being tested and will be included soon in next release. Any comment / feedback is welcome as usual!

Wise is back

It's been a couple of years since we wrote here last time. At least from my point of view, the project has basically been on hold while waiting for the underlying ws layer to stabilize (and for me to have time to update its integration here ;-)). Moreover we've been kind of waiting for the web gui work to come to an end, but unfortunately that never really took off due to lack of time from the contributors working on it. Anyway, in the mean time, both application server and its WS layer made giant steps ahead and JBoss AS 7 series comes today with a fully compliant web services stack based on a proper Apache CXF integration. Last summer I actually updated and cleaned-up the wise-core, made it build with Maven 3 and added support for AS 7, however that was not enough for a release. More recently I decided to invest some energies (and most of my spare time ;-)) on creating a GUI for the basic wise functionalities, basically what we had in the project before the donation to JBoss / Red Hat. So I basically started from one of the very nice JBoss Developer Framework quickstarts and built a JavaEE 6 web app based on CDI and JSF 2 (using RichFaces 4.3). I have to say that it actually turned out to be easier / faster then I expected to get to what you see in the snapshots below.
The GUI is basically a fully dynamic, single page webapp for quickly invoking webservice endpoints without the need of generating and compiling client stubs or directly writing SOAP xml messages. You start by typing the URL of the wsdl contract you want to consume (you can provide username and password if required, http basic auth only supported atm):

then you click on "OK" button and let Wise fetch the wsdl, parse it together with any referenced schema and finally present you a list of available endpoint operations:

you select an operation and Wise shows a tree representing the input parameters for that:

you can fill in input boxes with data, enable/disable elements (for nillable ones only) and add/remove elements for collection and list parameters. Finally, you click on "Perform invocation" button and get another tree for the result object:

That's all, very simple, yet really effective and quick solution for testing ws endpoints. No need for either writing a single line of code or playing with XML. No external tool needed (besides for your browser). And possibly even more interesting, no special technical knowledge required, so e.g a business analyst might validate WS service results without bugging the developer who worked on it ;-) (keep in mind that in most scenarios, exposing a simple test WS endpoint is basically a matter of adding a single @WebService annotation on a POJO or EJB3 class...)

You can get the Wise 2.0 core as well as the first Wise GUI release from the project download page. The core artifacts are also available on the JBoss Maven repository; the web GUI is meant for being deployed on JBoss AS 7.1 or greater, please refer to the enclosed README file for details on building and deploying it (it's basically a single command though, assuming you have Maven properly setup).

For the next releases, I can foresee interesting and not too difficult to achieve enhancements to the web GUI, mainly on supporting WS-Policy enabled endpoints / contracts (the underlying WS stack is already fully supporting that stuff). I will create jiras soon and will probably work on them assuming I can still save some time to spend on Wise; anyway any contribution is more then welcome, keep an eye on jira and feel free to jump in anytime.

Stay tuned!

As you know I'll be in Berlin Thursday and Friday for JUDCon talking about Wise.

As you know I'll be in Berlin Thursday and Friday for JUDCon talinkg about wise.
I'd like to use this opportunity to meet some of you and having great talks about Wise, SibillaTest (aka TestedBy), or any other geek's argument...you know what non-geek calls crazy.
Where and when ca you find me? Well check on tripit when I'll arrive and where I'll stay.
I'll be of course at JUDCon's HackFest, but I'm more than open to plan other talks over a German beer.
Would you have a run with me? I'll run in Berlin for sure Friday and maybe also Thursday in the morning (if I find friends running with me, I'll run for sure Thursday too).
I have in mind more or less 10km of easy running (1h or so) to take a look to the city, since I''ve never stayed in Berlin and it seems I'll not have more spare time to take a look around. More precisely I'd like to take this run.
Write me if you want to join me both for a run or a beer, we can agree meeting point and time. For German people: write me also if you see something wrong in the planned run...something like "too more traffic here"...or "too more gangsters there!!" :D

See you in Berlin

[cross posted here too]

Wise will be at JUDCon (Berlin 7-8 October)

As cross posted here, I'll present Wise projcet during next upcoming JUDcon.
As you can see from the agenda the speech will part of "Soa and integration track" and will be focused on this points:

• Wise core:
  
  
  
  • Support of WS-*
  
  
  • Integration in ESB
  
  
  • One line WS calls
  
  
  • API to explore the dynamic generated stubs
  
  
  
  


• Wise-wegui:
  
  
  
  • A tool to help business analysts during validation tests of WS
  
  
  • The legacy web GUI and how it has been used in my company during the last year
  
  
  • The upcoming GWT gui
  
  
  
  


• LMS: Logging Meta Service


• The Wise Code donation: why have I donated my pet project to JBoss.org

I'll post here and there a report of the speech and slides too.

I hope I'll have also opportunities to have some interesting lightning talks about Wise and/or TestedBy during spare time there. Twitter, comment on the blog, or email are all fine if you want to contact me about that. I'll probably post in next days some proposal to have a run together too :)

Wise have new cool logo

This is the new logo for Wise. Cool, isn’t it?

We’re excited to officially have our new brand. Thank you very much to James Cobb and Cheyenne Weaver for our new logo, graphics and other branding help.

As said in this post we are backing on Wise giving it a new life with a lot of development on the road. And we had to do them with this owl observing us so seriously

Don’t forget desktop wallpapers and/or to wear your open source pride!