On Dec 8, 2006, at 10:22 AM, Steve Jones wrote: > On 08/12/06, Stuart Charlton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> REST isn't much different, except that such policies & descrptions >> are often included as hypermedia associated links that are >> associated with the machine-readable interface itself. > > No-one appears to be able to point me at the standard way of doing > this in REST, paticularly the earlier publishing of the info to > consumers.
Note that there's no standard way of doing this in WS either. One generally writes a WSDL to describe a WS-style web service, but how do clients get that WSDL? Is there a standard for publishing those WSDLs and allowing clients to retrieve them? You might say UDDI, but only a few actually use that. Fact is, there is no widely- used WS registry or naming service standard. Some kits support tacking "?wsdl" onto the service URL to retrieve its WSDL, but unless I've missed a new standard along the way, that's only a convention, and again, only some kits support it (and it also requires a live service). So, Steve, when you write a WS-style web service, how *do* your clients get the information they need to be able to properly call your service? Do you post the WSDL on a web page where clients retrieve it, or do you use the ?wsdl convention, or do you write a Word doc and email it to your colleagues, or do you use UDDI or maybe a vendor-specific or homegrown registry, or perhaps you use yet another approach that I haven't mentioned? --steve
