Using SOAP UI to mock UDDI

In a recent SOA implementation we were relying on UDDI as  a service registry for dynamic discovery of service endpoints from the client tier. The client tier interacted with many services, and whilst (at a unit test level) we were isolate from the UDDI, when trying to manually test or just plain use the client, it was still reliant on a UDDI implementation. Obviously it’s possible to implement multiple registries to allow use in this manner, but in our case it seemed cheaper and easier (no comment as to the registry we were using) to create a mock!

We have been using SOAP UI for mocking service implementations during early phases of development for some time, so it seemed natural for one bright spark to try this with UDDI. Our UDDI implementation and therefore endpoint lookup was pretty simplistic (this was done on purpose) – each service had only a single (load balanced) endpoint that we looked up by binding key.

The following is a sample project that I know runs with SOAP UI version 3.0.1. The project file contains a demo mock UDDI project demonstrating how to lookup and return a packaged response based on a binding key. Creation of a mock service in SOAP UI is pretty straight forward the user guide is pretty good, so it should be pretty straight forward to add your own end points.