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Wednesday, January 23, 2002 |
In answer to Jon Udell, Sam Ruby writes:
Answer: WSDL is a roadmap. Both gum or grease need to actually touch the moving parts to have an affect. WSDL does neither. Look at a SOAP message and try to find the reference to the WSDL. It isn't there. Never has been. Look at the SOAP specification and try to find the reference to a WSDL. It isn't there either.
Agreed. WSDL is part of the documentation of the service, not part of the service itself. Regardless, the tools for creating and consuming WSDL do need a lot of improvement.
For me, the real question that needs to be answered is not whether WSDL is really necessary, or when/where/how exactly it should be created/used/consumed, but how WSDL can be improved to make it easier to write good interoperable implementations of it. I'd much rather see us kicking those ideas around.
4:17:41 PM 
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Simon: WSDL is currently as simple as it will probably ever get, especially once the W3C effort gets under way. Good tooling support will help users make the best of it as the spec evolves (XML Schema is an extremely good case in point). Are there things in WSDL that can be improved? Of course, but those changes will be a while in coming. In the meantime, it would still be nice to have a good editor.
2:52:28 PM
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Simon, I got your point. I think we'd both agree that what is really needed is a really good WSDL editor, something that equals the quality of XML Spy's XML Schema editor (if anybody from Altova is reading this, take notes). This would hide many of the complexities and give us a good starting point with which to move forward.
12:24:35 PM
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Simon Fell comments that it is impractical to write WSDL by hand. I would agree with that but not as a blanket statement. It is only impractical to write WSDL's by hand when you're creating Web Service interfaces directly from application code (such as a Java class or a COM object). WSDL, however, also makes a great interface specification language. Want to create a standard type of Web service? Create a WSDL description for it and publish it on the Web. Now anybody can create an implementation of it. Great example: the UDDI publish and inquiry API's. Another set of good examples: the utility services that we just shipped in the Web Services Toolkit. We started by creating WSDL descriptions and then writing the code to implement them, not the other way around. Worked great and got us exactly what we wanted. Now we can use the same WSDL interfaces regardless of the code implementation behind them. All you need to make it easier is a good XML editor.
12:20:19 AM
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