Simon Fell > Its just code

Monday, November 18, 2002

Modeling without WSDL Mark Ericson has some thoughts on Interface design with WSDL, I agree with him, WSDL is far to cumbersome to work with by hand, the only way to be remotely productive is to use some sort of tool, personally I like Omniopera, YMMV. But it would be much better if we didn't have to resort to tools (This sounds strangely like the current debates over RDF). From what I've seen so far, WSDL 1.2 will be a step in the right direction, but I don't think it'll get to the level where easy to work with WSDL by hand. In the past I've prototyped SOAP interfaces in directly in IDL, and compiled that up into a type library for 4s4c to use and to generate WSDL from. In a lot of cases though WSDL generation tools suffer from leaky abstractions, you have to be really careful in this approach, that you don't inadvertently paint yourself into a corner, many tools are more than happy to take you down a non-interoperable path (just witness the number of questions about working with Microsoft's dataset's, or Apache's map serialization).
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