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

On Sep 5, 2006, at 3:35 PM, Mark Baker wrote:
>
> The "request" stanza is an authoritative description of the parameters
> needed to search news, so that's good... though I think it would help
> to ground the parameters in URI space to provide a hook for automata
> to infer parameters types (as I did with RDF Forms) - as is, it's only
> good for human consumption (right back at ya, Sanjiva 8-), unless a
> registry of parameter names and associated meanings is presumed (I
> assume not).
>
Nice idea (grounding parameters in URI space), seems like an ID  
attribute on param would provide the necessary hook.

> The "response" stanza is non-authoritative though, because the
> response message itself is authoritative.  As Noah discussed, there's
> sometimes value in providing this information, but the costs of
> counting on it need to be understood.  And as Mark seemed to imply
> (and I agree), sometimes it's possible for those costs to exceed the
> benefits.  For one, I'd definitely recommend removing schema from
> there, as they're notoriously brittle since authors don't typically
> account for extensibility  (another major complaint of mine against
> WSDL).
>
The "response stanza" is intended to be a list of available  
representations to allow a service to declare what formats are  
available. The example only has a custom XML format but you could  
imagine an Atom feed and JSON also being available.

I agree with the concern about schema (note that the representation/ 
@element attribute is optional) but I think that should be a decision  
for each service provider rather than something that should be  
prohibited outright. Its quite possible to come up with a versioning  
policy to alleviate such problems.

> The only other thing that WADL would require would be an integration
> story; how to embed a WADL document inside documents containing other
> languages.  It would imagine it could look something like XForms' - in
> fact WADL would be competitive with XForms.
>
Have to think about that but it doesn't look too tricky. WADL uses  
URI refs for inter and intra document references so embedding WADL  
elements in other documents should be quite do-able.

Marc.

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