# Testing Web Services with the Web Service Explorer

This tutorial shows how to use the Web Service Explorer to test a Web service via native WSDL and SOAP. It demonstrates how to use the Web Services Explorer to invoke operations on a Web service named " Temperature - Weather " as available from XMethods on the internet.

The only prerequisite is that you be connected to the internet. If you are connected via a firewall, you can use the Internet preferences page (choose Preferences -> Internet from the main menu). Other than that, you can begin with a completely fresh workspace and no installed servers.

## Testing With The Web Services Explorer

1. From the main menu bar, select Run -> Launch the Web Services Explorer . This will take a few moments the first time while the internal Tomcat server starts up and loads the Web Services Explorer application.
2. After the Web Browser view opens, maximize it. You should see the following:
3. In the Web Service Explorer's toolbar (top-right), click on the WSDL Page icon,
4. Click on the WSDL Main icon. You should see the following:
5. In the WSDL URL field, enter the URL `http://www.xmethods.net/sd/2001/TemperatureService.wsdl` , then click on Go .
6. Under Operations in the right hand pane, click on getTemp .
7. In the zipcode string entry field, enter `90210` , then click on Go . In the Status pane, you should see an answer like this:
   return (float): 57.0

   You may need to move the horizontal bar separating the Actions and Status panes upwards a bit to get a better view. Result:

## Explanation

The Web Services Explorer is a JSP Web application hosted on the internal Apache Tomcat servlet engine. It is integrated on two levels: visually by virtue of it running in the embedded browser, and logically by virtue of it running as a thread in same JRE as your application. Though not demonstrated in this scenario, this latter type of integration allows the Web Services Explorer to access resources in the workspace, write resources into the workspace, and launch various Web services wizards.

The Web Services Explorer provides three key services to the user:

1. Comprehensive support for discovering Web services in WS-Inspection 1.0 documents, and in UDDI v2 or v3 registries using the UDDI v2 protocol.
2. Comprehensive support for publishing Web services to UDDI v2 or v3 registries using the UDDI v2 protocol.
3. Comprehensive support for browsing and invoking Web services natively via their WSDL and XSD.

A key point of the scenario above is that no code was generated and no servers were required in order to invoke operations on the WSDL.