RE: Requesting WSDL Files

Dear Roger,

 

I don't think that there is a specification and I feel that one would be
unnecessary. The ?WSDL suffix can be used when HTTP is involved but how
do we get the WSDL of a Web Service when we use TCP/IP or SMTP or any
other protocol? That's the reason for the existence of the
WS-MetadataExchange specification. That will be the way to go. If you
know the endpoint of a Web Service, then you can ask it for its WSDL,
its policy, etc.

 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/understanding/specs/default.aspx?p
ull=/library/en-us/dnglobspec/html/ws-metadataexchange.asp 

 

Regards,

--
Savas Parastatidis
http://savas.parastatidis.name
  

________________________________

From: www-ws-arch-request@w3.org [mailto:www-ws-arch-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler)
Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2004 7:27 PM
To: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: Requesting WSDL Files

 

Here's a question that is sort of WSA-like.  I guess.  

We have some experience with WS interop, but so far it's all one
direction:  Web service on Windows server, clients on other platforms.
Sooner or later we will want to go the other direction.  One really nice
feature of the Microsoft .Net implementation of Web services is that if
you append "?WSDL" (or "?wsdl") to the URL of the Web service it will
return the WSDL file.  As far as I know this is not in any spec (I could
easily be wrong, of course), but it's clearly useful and I'm using it.
So the obvious questions are:

1 - Is this indeed part of some spec that I don't know about, so one
should expect it on other platforms? 

2 - If not, have other major vendors been doing this too?  Is it by any
stretch becoming a de facto standard? 

3 - If so, is there any case preference on platforms that tend to be
more case sensitive than Windows?