Hi,
* REST does not require a WSDL but it could very well use it.
no, it does not and some people in the REST world are concerned that *any* description language can be harmful - something I not
totally agree with. If WSDL 2.0 were adopted at a wider scale then perhaps people would describe RESTful services with it too -
especially when doing both WS-* and RESTful services.
* In the REST world, WADL (Web Application Description Language) is more
appropriate than a WSDL.
WADL is geared toward describing RESTful services thus it much simpler than WSDL. It kind of looks easier on the eye. I like it. It
will be up to a developer to choose. Jersey supports WADL - hope CXF will support it in some form too. But there's a number of
factor which will actuall determine what description language has to be used, if any (adoption rate, internal policies, etc).
* A SOAP client could work with a RESTful service implementation.
Why not ? See for ex this blog entry :
http://sberyozkin.blogspot.com/2008/07/rest-and-soap-united-in-cxf.html
It's not the recipe for all cases - there we start with a JAX-WS server impl and seamlessly upgrade it to do JAX-RS, but it could've
been the other way around. In this case, even WSDL 1.1 can do - for a SOAP client only. As I said earlier, perhaps it would be
possible to create a WSDL2.0 description for a RESTful JAX-RS service (I'm not 100% sure how SOAP client should behave in the
presence of WSDL 2.0 instance with a SOAP binding and web-methods other than POSTs, that is. would, say, a SOAP client translate
some getFoo() request into a GET with some query params) - and then have SOAP client talking to a pure JAX-RS server...
Cheers, Sergey
----------------------------
IONA Technologies PLC (registered in Ireland)
Registered Number: 171387
Registered Address: The IONA Building, Shelbourne Road, Dublin 4, Ireland
