Best of this Week Summary 25 March - 30 March 2008

• What is required to start building an RIA + SOA application, and how you could enable these activities. A potential answer could the Appcelerator platform mentioned in the article.
  


• Nice collection of open source software testing tools (and news and discussion :-). These are the listed Javascript unittesting tools.
  


• For the coders: the number of types in the .NET framework visualized (I know, I know, .NET but it's a nice insight anyway ;-)
  


• Comparison of performance on many browsers of the Backbase Javascript engine and some widgets. In general interesting to see how these browsers compare. Includes IE8, Firefox 3 Nightly Build and Safari Nightly Build.
  


• Three open source SOAP testing tools compared: Eviware SoapUI 1.6, PushToTest TestMaker, and WebInject's WebInject. Conclusion: The writer prefers "[...] the middle balance struck by soapUI. The skeletal tests created by soapUI's wizard were easier to flesh out than those built by TestMaker. And, if I needed to do something elaborate and off the wall, I could always call upon soapUI's Groovy capabilities – funny name aside, they do their job well." "In terms of how these products compare to commercial Web service testing tools, I'd say it's a mixed bag. They are, of course, inexpensive (free), and work well for easy to moderately-difficult jobs; on the other hand, they're somewhat less user-friendly than commercial tools and if you need to do something complex, you have to build it yourself."
  


• Five commercial SOAP testing tools compared: AdventNet's QEngine, Crosscheck Networks SOAPSonar, iTKO’s LISA, Mindreef's SOAPscope Server, and Parasoft's SOAtest. Conclusion: "If your testing involves more than just Web services, and your development is primarily Java, then tools such as LISA or SOAtest are worth considering [...]. If, however, you are only interested in SOAP-based Web service testing, and your QA staff is relatively new to the technology, SOAPscope is the obvious choice." But maybe you want to let it depend on how you want to build the tests: by coding or visually with a GUI? This is what SOAPSonar, LISA, and SOAPscope have done. The writer favors coding tests and SOATest came out as winner.