SOAPMonitor is a java applet application that can be invoked from command line. If you have installed Axis and set up its classpath and other software right, it is very easy to use. Unlike TCP monitor, Axis SOAPMonitor doesn??t need change any codes in web services or their clients.

Simple Steps Using Axis SOAPMonitor

We assume axis services are installed at %TOMCAT_HOME%\webapps\axis.

In the sub folder %TOMCAT_HOME%\webapps\axis\WEB-INF, we can find a file users.lst

We add a user admin with password ??secretpass??. In users.lst, first column is for user names, while the second column is for user??s password.

After we added admin to users.lst file, it looks like List 1.

List 1. users.lst

user1 pass1
user2 
user3 pass3
admin secretpass

We assume you have add all jar files in %AXIS_HOME%\lib folder to classpath. Specifically, following jar files should be in the classpath variable.

axis.jar 
jaxrpc.jar 
saaj.jar 
commons-logging.jar 
commons-discovery.jar 
activation.jar 
mail.jar 
A XML parser such as Xerces

Start the web application server Tomcat that contains Axis.

If you type command line in a windows console

java org.apache.axis.utils.SOAPMonitor

You should see the SOAPMonitor

Type "admin" as User, "secretpass" as Password, and click OK button.

You should see the screenshot

In our case, we select myecho, echo and simplemath services, then click "Turn On" button to monitor these services.
After turn on these services, we click the tab "Monitoring" on the top left corner. And open another windows console, and start a client application connecting to myecho service.
We can see SOAPMonitor recording the request and response SOAP message for the application.

We thus have shown how easy to use SOAPMonitor to find SOAP requests and SOAP responses.