What is WSDL and is it useful? was: Re: [ANN] Ruby/Google
Pete McBreen
>What is WSDL and what does it do for us?
There are many views on that. WSDL makes it easy for toolsets to generate
the appropriate code to invoke SOAP / Web Services. The "dream" is that an
organization will publish the availability of it's web services in a
directory (UDDI) and from the WSDL (read IDL) you will be able to
"automagically" work out how to invoke the service.
Dyanamic languages like Ruby don't really need WSDL, but it is great for
the tool vendors. WSDL is a real pain to create manually.
Simon Fell says
[http://www.pocketsoap.com/weblog/stories/2002/01/13/whatsWsdl.html]
"If you ignore all the politics and WSDL will save the earth hype, and
concentrate on what people are doing with WSDL, then things become
clearer, WSDL is simply a SOAP server description language, it describes
everything you need to know in order to make a sucessfull call to a SOAP
endpoint. The information includes methodNames, namespace URI's, encoding
styles, soap endpoint URL(s), parameters and data types. If you are a COM
or CORBA programmer then you should recognise WSDL as being the IDL of
SOAP. "
The following sites should give you a feel for the debate
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=7031/byt1015007393289/0304_udell.html
http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2001/03/03
http://www.xmlrpc.com/discuss/msgReader$555
http://radio.weblogs.com/0101679/2002/01/24.html#a23
http://radio.weblogs.com/0101679/2002/03/05.html
http://radio.weblogs.com/0101679/stories/2002/02/15/aBusyDevelopersGuideTo
Wsdl11.html
Pete
----
Pete McBreen, McBreen.Consulting , Cochrane, AB
email: petem...@acm.org http://www.mcbreen.ab.ca/
Author, "Software Craftsmanship The New Imperative"
Addison-Wesley (C) 2002
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201733862
Finalist for the 2002 Jolt Awards