Software Testing Tools Question:

Anteater is a testing framework designed around Ant, from the Apache Jakarta Project. It is basically a set of Ant tasks for the functional testing of Web sites and Web services (functional testing being: hit a URL and ensure the response meets certain criteria). One can test HTTP parameters, response codes, XPath, regexp, and Relax NG expressions. Anteater also includes HTML reporting (based on junitreport) and a hierarchical grouping system for quickly configuring large test scripts. When a Web request is received, Anteater can check the parameters of the request and send a response accordingly. This makes it useful for testing SOAP and XML applications.

The ability to wait for incoming HTTP messages is something unique to Anteater, which makes it especially useful when building tests for applications that use high level SOAP-based communication, like ebXML or BizTalk. Applications written using these protocols usually receive SOAP messages and send back a meaningless response. It is only later that they inform the client, using an HTTP request on the client, about the results of the processing. These are the so-called asynchronous SOAP messages, and are the heart of many high-level protocols based on SOAP or XML messages.

Written in Java, HttpUnit emulates the relevant portions of browser behavior, including form submission, Javascript, basic HTTP authentication, cookies, and automatic page redirection, and allows Java test code to examine returned pages either as text, an XML DOM, or containers of forms, tables, and links.