This is a single archived entry from Stefan Tilkov’s blog. For more up-to-date content, check out my author page at INNOQ, which has more information about me and also contains a list of published talks, podcasts, and articles. Or you can check out the full archive.

WSDL 2.0 and REST

Stefan Tilkov,

Sanjiva points out that after quite some time, somebody - in this case, Keith Chapman - took up the challenge and described my example RESTful scenario using WSDL 2.0.

Cool, and I do concede that WSDL 2.0 does a much better job than WSDL 1.1.

One of the interesting aspects is the try out page, which is generated from the WSDL. Essentially this means that metadata is used to generate the self-descriptive form; somewhat backwards from a REST perspective, but understandable given that the goal was to have an external description in the first place.

Some questions:

  • How does one one describe representation formats other than XML?
  • How is content negotiation supported?
  • How does one describe whether a URI parameter is a query parameter, path element, or matrix parameter?
  • Is there a way to describe response codes?
  • What about describing hypermedia? :-)

I haven't had the time to look at the implementation in detail.

On September 16, 2008 7:53 PM, Keith Author Profile Page said:

Stefan,

Check out the answers to these questions on my blog.