Proceedings

Track: Late Breaking News, Large-Scale Architectures, Core Technologies

Audience Level: Technical view

Time: Thursday, November 17 09:00

Keywords: XML, HTTP, Web, Description, Application, Services

Abstract:

An increasing number of Web based enterprises (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Flickr to name but a few) are developing HTTP-based applications that provide access to their internal data using XML. Today, these applications are typically described using a combination of textual protocol descriptions combined with XML schema-based data format descriptions. Interestingly, the Web Service Description Language (WSDL) is rarely used to describe such applications and generally is only used where a parallel SOAP-based service is exposed. There are probably many reasons for this but chief amongst them must be the fact that WSDL is not a Web-oriented language and the WSDL HTTP binding appears to be something of an afterthought.

In reaction to this emerging trend, the W3C recently started a new mailing list (public-web-http-desc@w3.org) dedicated to discussion of Web description languages based on URI/IRI and HTTP, and aligned with the Web and REST Architecture. This paper frames the subject of Web description and describes one of the candidate XML languages, the Web Application Description Language (WADL), designed to provide a machine process-able protocol description format for use with HTTP-based Web applications, especially those using XML.