Re: Is it a good idea to make your WADL available?

If I might channel Mark for a moment (Mark, I'm sure you'll jump in  
if I misinterpret), I think there's an unstated assumption in his  
reasoning that might clarify things. AIUI, Mark believes that there  
will/should only be a few standard formats in use (e.g. Atom for list- 
type data, XHTML for form type data etc) and that such a constrained  
world is more amenable to general-purpose processing modules, one per  
format, each of which fully groks the format it is intended to  
process and the semantics of data and metadata contained therein.

Personally, even if the above turns out to be the dominant paradigm,  
I still think there's utility in setting out a map of the available  
resources and their supported methods and representations and with  
APP and OpenSearch we already have existence proof that such  
descriptions are useful. I just hope we can avoid a plethora of such  
description languages.

Marc.

On Sep 4, 2006, at 4:39 AM, Sanjiva Weerawarana wrote:

>
> Mark Baker wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Same battle new forum .. hi Mark ;-).
>
> I don't understand you at all - so its ok to put the info in  
> English (or Korean or Sinhalese) but its not ok to put it in XML in  
> a machine processable format??
>
> Do you think that (obviously crazy) programmers don't read English  
> (or Korean or Sinhalese) and *couple* their programs to the  
> services thus described? Or do you think that because you don't put  
> it down in XML that they hand write magic self learning code that  
> can handle any change in the data dynamically?
>
> Its easy to do this stuff when there's a smart agent like a human  
> in front of course. When there's no human in the loop the problem  
> is a just a tad harder.
>
> Sanjiva.
> -- 
> Sanjiva Weerawarana, Ph.D.
> Founder, Chairman & CEO; WSO2, Inc.; http://www.wso2.com/
> email: sanjiva@wso2.com; cell: +94 77 787 6880; fax: +1 509 691 2000
>
> "Oxygenating the Web Service Platform."
>

---
Marc Hadley <marc.hadley at sun.com>
Business Alliances, CTO Office, Sun Microsystems.