Norm's been working on describing a where in the world application using WSDL 1.1 and SOAP. He says WSDL sucks, but I think that he really meant to say is that WSDL 1.1 sucks. Lots of us have spent time on WSDL 2.0 to try to clean up lots of the things he found problems with. A while ago I sent him a WSDL 2.0 version of WITW, but he's gotten busy so I thought I'd post the WITW WSDL 2.0 and is-request.xsd
One of the biggies is improving the HTTP/REST binding for WSDL. WSDL 2.0 can describe a variety of REST services. In fact, I've done provide a list of WSDL 2.0 REST descriptions that includes Atom 0.3, Yahoo Search, Music search, WSDL 2.0 Primer Travel Reservations (GET Reservation, PUT Reservation, GET ReservationList), and this is the WITW WSDL 2.0 version. Why people keep saying that WSDL can't describe REST seems grossly unfair to me.
I also wish that people that bash WSDL 1.1 would take a look at WSDL 2.0. I am completely sympathetic to the arcane-ness of the wsdl 2.0 spec as I'm one of the people that lost the vote where WSD WG decided that the specs were for toolkit authors not wsdl document authors. But at least take a look at the primer.
If there's a core concept to examine in REST description languages wrt WSDL, it's whether WSDL's aggregation of operations into interfaces and then binding to http makes sense. Web services tends to have lots of operations and few URIs, whereas REST is obviously the opposite. And so an "interface" construct for operations + binding seems to me to be the parts of WSDL that are most problematic for REST and this would be the core of any simplification over WSDL 2.0. OTOH, it's quite clear that WSDL 2.0 can take interfaces for multiple bindings and deploy to SOAP and non-SOAP based services.
Dave,
To be fair, I didn't say that WSDL couldn't describe HTTP/XML or REST communication. I merely said that it couldn't do it properly (with a link to the reasons why).
And of course, WSDL is unfairly maligned by people, and it's a big target because it's the most commonly recognized SDL today. The trick is to make specific critcisms clear to other folks instead of just carping about it, which I apparently failed to do.
I will try again and thanks for the link.