With Oracle acquiring Sun in April 2009, it also took control of Java’s future. Everyone agreed Java technology was more or less stalling before this buyout happened, however knowing differences between the cultures at Sun and Oracle, many people (analysts and developers especially) realized that for better or worse, the agreement would have massive consequences for the whole ecosystem.

This new era in Java ‘s history began badly, with Java creator James Gosling leaving the company in September 2009, followed by JRuby and Hudson creators amongst many others.  The problems continued, with the Apache Software Foundation leaving the Java Community Process, the underlying entity leading evolution and certification of Java. For developers like me who are daily users of Apache’s tools and libraries, this was not good news. Not to mention recent lawsuits against Google concerning the Android ecosystem…

Fortunately it is not all gloom and doom : Oracle made some important decisions since they abandoned uncertain technologies such as JavaFX Script and finally adopted a plan for the next release of the programming language. Many predicted the fall of the Java ecosystem last year, but it seems to me that there are far fewer voices expressing such opinions as of late, as TIOBE confirmed Java is still the most popular programming language.

It is interesting to wonder what might have happened had Java been less popular, although for now it looks like the Java community is strong and is set for a brighter future… at least I hope so!

Web services are more and more used for Java projects, especially since the popularity and the ease of use of frameworks such as Axis, CXF has quickly increased over the last few years. Native support in application servers for specifications like JAX-WS has also greatly encouraged developers and architects to use those technologies in their Things get problematic when you begin to use and test those services and/or when you need to mock them. Enters SOAP UI. This is a free graphical tool created by eviware : it’s basically a Java Swing application but it is also available as an Eclipse or Netbeans plugin.

SOAP UI let you use and test your Web services :

• You can easily create and run test suites and test cases « a la JUNIT ». Those tests can range  from very simple to very advanced with complex assertions and included groovy scripts.
• You can also easily do load testing to make sure your services performances are acceptable in the real world.

More interesting, SOAP UI lets you easily mock a Web service from a given WSDL. You can setup your mock to make it react as you wish and when it’s ready you can directly run it from SOAP UI. Finally SOAP UI can also generate client and implementation for JAX-WS, Axis, XFire, JBoss WS and many more frameworks.

There is also a commercial version, SOAP UI Pro, which offers advanced features like form designer or datasource integration for testcases. More information on http://www.soapui.org