Tooling for SOA projects is certainly a work in progress with specifications like SCA and JBI under development.
When it comes to good old fashioned SOAP, a few good tools come to mind like XML Spy, NetTool, SOAPScope and others. I'm sure every developer has their favorite tool.
One tool in the open source community, called soapui seems to be undergoing some rapid updating with a new "dot rev" (not a major revision) available on a monthy basis. That tool is soapui, available under the LGPL license.
For those not familiar with LGPL, it's the non-viral variant of GNU Public License, and is generally considered a reasonably business friendly license, being used most famously by OpenOffice.org. The LGPL is also the license through which the majority of JBoss Inc. (a subsidiary of RedHat Software) is distributed. According to the JBoss web site "The LGPL is the most business-friendly license for enterprise IT organizations, independent software vendors, and the open source community itself."
The soapui tool is a Java 1.5 based desktop application for inspecting, invoking, developing and functional/load/compliance testing of web services over HTTP. It is mainly aimed at developers/testers providing and/or consuming web services (java, .net, etc). Functional and Load-Testing can be done both interactively in soapui or within an automated build/integration process using the soapui command-line tools.
Major improvements in this release include:
- Support for Attachments (MTOM / SwA / Inlining)
- 12 Tool integrations for;
- Code Generation; JBossWS (wstools), JAX-RPC (wscompile), JAX-WS (wsimport), XFire 1.1.X (WsGen), Axis 1.X (wsdl2java), Axis 2 (wsdl2code), JAXB 2.0 (xjc), XmlBeans 2.X (scomp), GSoap 2.7.X and .NET 2.0, including a ToolRunner for running code-generation tools from the command line
- WSDL-Generation; JBossWS (wstools)
- WS-I Basic Profile Validations
- Apache TcpMon
- WSDL Caching and exporting
- JUnit Reports for functional tests from commandline