On Sun, 2006-11-26 at 11:50 +0100, Jan Algermissen wrote:
> On Nov 25, 2006, at 8:08 AM, Sanjiva Weerawarana wrote:
> 
> > WSDL? You either need WSDL (2.0, not 1.1 as the new version has much
> > better POX/HTTP support) or something like it. How else do you tell
> > other (computers) what your RESTful service does?
> 
> Examples:
> 
> http://ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-11.txt
> 
> http://tools.ietf.org/wg/atompub/draft-snell-atompub-feature-01.txt
> 
> (the later one being essentially a means to discover services by  
> capability).

I assume you're referring to ATOM service documents. I don't see how
that can be used to define say a URL template, which most people now
recognize as a necessary thing to describe even fully RESTful services.
Am I missing something?

> Aside: can WSDL tell me *everything* I need to know to decide that  
> some service
> Foo is the one I want?

Of course not. 

WSDL tells you *no* semantic information. It only tells you the bare
bones of what you need to know: the format of the data to be sent and
what the service will return. That's it. It doesn't even tell you
whether the data should be signed- that's the domain of WS-Policy and
WS-SecurityPolicy. 

What would make you or anyone think that WSDL provided everything you
needed to know to make a service identity decision?

Sanjiva.
-- 
Sanjiva Weerawarana, Ph.D.
Founder & Director; Lanka Software Foundation; http://www.opensource.lk/
Founder, Chairman & CEO; WSO2, Inc.; http://www.wso2.com/
Director; Open Source Initiative; http://www.opensource.org/
Member; Apache Software Foundation; http://www.apache.org/
Visiting Lecturer; University of Moratuwa; http://www.cse.mrt.ac.lk/

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