The integration with these external services is usually done with the use of framework help. For example in a couple of projects I used WebServiceTemplate. In other project i had Mule ESB calling to a Web Service Endpoint, etc.
In most cases I pass a pojo to a method and the framework takes care of everything, marshalling, adding headers, sending. And in some cases the debug info that the framework outputs is not enough to see what is going on the wire. I need to see the actual message i’m sending or receiving from the remote host.
For this cases i use tcpdump for capturing traffic, and Wireshark for displaying it. I explain how to do this:
Let’s suppose we are connecting to the Calculator Web Service in
http://soatest.parasoft.com/calculator.wsdl
We want to see the exact contents of our request as it leaves our network interface.
we go to a shell window and execute the following as root
tcpdump -i wlan0 -w /tmp/xxx.dmp -s 1500 dst ws1.parasoft.com
where wlan0 is the network interface in use, /tmp/xxx.dmp the file where we are storing the output, 1500 the capture packet size, and ws1.parasoft.com the destination address for filtering the packets sent (Only packets with this destination will be captured by tcpdump)
We then execute our code that makes the request (In this example i’m doing the request with soapUI, calling the operation add on the web service).
After doing the operation, we terminate the running tcpdump, go to wireshark and open the file /tmp/xxx.dmp. And we see the following:
We can now click on the line with the Protocol HTTP/XML and see the contents of the soap xml message, the http headers, etc:
This way, we have a complete knowledge of what is going on the wire, and maybe this knowledge helps us to debug some problems that can be harder to debug without this knowledge.
Carlo
