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

Marc,
 
On Tuesday, September 05, 2006, at 02:58PM, Marc Hadley <Marc.Hadley@Sun.COM> wrote:

>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 

IMO, the right way to create such a description is to have it generated by a client that
excercises the application and keeps track of the current state machine. Generating it has
two advantages: it emphazises the possible instability of that information and it provides a
fine impression of what the contract really is that the client can rely on (IOW: what is not
runtime-discoverable or in the HTP specs must not be known).

It can also show places, where additional contract is required for machine clients to excercise the
application.


Jan


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.
>
>
>
>


------------------------------------------------------------
Jan Algermissen                                               http://jalgermissen.com
Software Architect                                            http://www.tugboat.de

Received on Tuesday, 5 September 2006 21:00:34 UTC