RESTful Services - WSDL Equivalent

Question

I have been reading about REST and SOAP, and understand why implementing REST can be beneficial over using a SOAP protocol. However, I still don\'t understand why there isn

Answer 1

RSDL aims to turn rest like a hypermedia, in other words, it has more information than a service descriptor like WSDL or WADL. For example, it has the information about navigation, like hypertext and hyperlinks.

For example, given a current resource, you have a set os links to another resources related.

However, i didn't find Rest Clients that supports this format or Rest Server Solutions with a feature to auto generate it.

I think there is a long way for a conclusion about it. See the HTML long story and W3C vs Browsers lol.

For more details about Rest like Hypermedia look it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS

Note : Roy Fielding has been criticizing these tendencies in Rest Apis without the hypermidia approach: http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven

My Conclusion : Now a Days, WADL is more common that Rest and Integration Frameworks like Camel CXF already supports WADL ( generate and consume ), because it is similar to WSDL, therefore most easy to understand in this migration process ( SOAP to REST ).

Let's see the next chapters ;)

Answer 2

WSDL 2.0 specification has added support for REST web services too. Best of both worlds scenario. Problem is WSDL 2.0 is not widely supported by most tools out there yet. WSDL 2.0 is W3C recommended, WSDL1.1 is not W3C recommended but widely supported by tools and developers. Ref: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-restwsdl/