Re: Is it a good idea to make your WADL available? from Mark Baker on 2006-09-02 (public-web-http-desc@w3.org from September 2006)

From: Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>
Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2006 16:31:38 -0400
To: "Marc Hadley" <Marc.Hadley@sun.com>
Cc: public-web-http-desc@w3.org
Message-ID: <c70bc85d0609021331g14bf3e6cp381bf4d650fbca8b@mail.gmail.com>

Marc,

On 8/31/06, Marc Hadley <Marc.Hadley@sun.com> wrote:
> I think you should leave it up to clients to decide how they choose
> to use the information you provide. Not providing a WADL in order to
> protect clients from themselves seems a little self defeating - you
> have to provide information in some form to make your service
> useable.

And there's the rub.  In a RESTful system, that information is
contained within the data consumed by your application; forms and
links.  If you *also* put that information in a document not intended
for application consumption, then at best you've duplicated
information, and at worse you've confused your clients as to what's
authoritative.

Mark.

Received on Saturday, 2 September 2006 20:31:47 UTC