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Using the Eclipse Web Services Explorer

Posted on Apr 24, 2007

Those of you familiar with DreamWeaver know that form many years (or at least since I last used it years ago) it had a very convenient wed services explorer that allowed you to easily view the methods and arguments of external web services. This can be an extremely useful feature, particularly when working with long and complicated web services (like the Confluence one I am working with). With a little help from Ryan Guill (yes, he is still alive), I located the Web Services Explorer in Eclipse which comes as part of the Web Tools Platform. You can find this under Run > Launch the Web Services Explorer. While it isn't as intuitive as the one built into Dreamweaver, it works well and very nicely allows you to test all the methods in your web service.Setup and Loading a WSDL URL
Like I said, I didn't find the tool to be overly intuitive. First, it opened into the UDDI explorer and what I wanted was to view an external WSDL file. This can be done by clicking the icon in the top right of the Web Services Explorer window that is directly to the left of the star (I am not sure what the icon is, but if you hover over it, it says "WSDL Page"). Next, simply enter the WSDL URL in the form and hit "Go". For this example you could enter the National Weather Service API by entering "http://www.weather.gov/forecasts/xml/SOAP_server/ndfdXMLserver.php?wsdl".

At work this caused me some trouble because it would seem to time out because it was not respecting my proxy settings. To fix this, you can go to Window > Preferences, select "Internet Proxy Settings" and enter your proxy information there.

Viewing and Testing Web service Methods
I chose to test the NDFDgenByDay service of the NOAA API. Here are the values I tested (which is supposed to represent Boston...I think):

Click on "Go" and you should see the returned data show up in the status portion of the window. You can click the header of the status window to maximize it and see the data better. It will display in a raw text format which isn't necessarily the most readable thing. You can click the source link to see the data you sent and the data returned in a slightly more readable XML format. According to this, today's Daily Maximum Temperature in Boston is a lovely 73 degrees :)

Clicking back on the main web service URL in the navigator, you have some other options in the Actions window (or using the icons in the upper right of the Actions window), including adding the WSDL to your favorites. Clicking this will save the url to your "Favorite WSDL Services" folder accessible by clicking the star icon on the upper right hand corner of the Web Services Explorer window.

Conclusion
While not the easiest tool in the world to use, the Web Services Explorer is a powerful and necessary utility if you are working with external web service resources...and I have not even touched the UDDI and WSIL utilities (to be honest I don't have much experience with either). Hopefully future iterations of this tool will improve on its usability.

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