REST and WSDL and some rants

Posted on | September 23, 2008 | 1 Comment

I’ve been doing some research on REST support in WSDL lately. My mileage was a bit long due to various reasons. I don’t think that it should have been that long, so that drives the ‘rants’. I hope to gather what I found in one post so that others in the same boat don’t have to go as far.

First, here is the verdict: “REST-based web services can now fully described in WSDL 2.0.” However, whenever you see that a product/company/community mentions that they support WSDL, it is unlikely, at least for now, that they really support WSDL 2.0 and REST. They probably support WSDL 1.1.

And now, the elaboration.

Let’s get a few facts out:

1. There has been several versions of WSDL that has been published. The most widely adopted version is version 1.1, which contain extension to support SOAP 1.1, MIME, and HTTP GET/POST-only bindings. Version 1.1 was submitted to W3C in 2001, but was never really endorsed by them.
2. Between 2002 and 2003 version 1.2 of WSDL were developed. Several drafts were submited to w3c, and eventually they have decided to call this as WSDL 2.0. This one only still supports HTTP GET and POST. So it still does not fully capable of describing RESTfull web services.
3. That version of WSDL 2 continues to evolve and it eventually supports all HTTP methods.
4. Until now (23 Sept, 2008), W3C has not yet endorsed any WSDL version, however, on June 26, 2007 W3C finally recomended one version of WSDL 2.0. This one supports all HTTP methods, and hence able to describe RESTfull web services.

And now more rants:

1. If you Google wsdl2 or wsdl2.0 now(23 Sept, 2008), you would get this version. Which is old, and wrong, but already called WSDL 2.0. If you are not careful, you’d be lead to believe that it doesn’t support REST.
2. Stefan Tilkov once posted a challenge to show how a RESTfull web services can be described in WSDL 2.0.
3. Close to 2 years later, a few days ago, Keith Chapman answered the challenge.
4. Keith’s boss bashed Stefan in his blog here.
5. Which in my eyes not really fair since Stefan posted the challenge in 2006, before WSDL 2.0. became a recommendation and before it supports all HTTP verbs.

Comments

One Response to “REST and WSDL and some rants”

1. REST and Python | Luchita
   September 29th, 2008 @ 4:56 pm

   [...] I mentioned here, recently I’ve been doing some research in REST. Specifically, I’ve been looking for [...]

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