I used to use something like SoapUI for casual calling of webservices. But most of the time a GUI feels like overkill for just calling one webservice function.

Recently I found the python SUDS library . It is so simple that I now just launch my all webservice calls from the command line.

from suds import WebFault
from suds.client import Client

client = Client('http://localhost:8080/myapp/mywebservice?wsdl')

print client

print client.service.MyFunction('Hello')

The “print client” in the middle prints an overview of the functions defined in the wsdl (nice to have). It is really easy. The only problem is that SUDS is not packaged in Debian/Ubuntu yet, so it is a little more trouble to install than just “apt-get install ….”. Maybe I should try to do something about that.