Re: Requesting WSDL Files

MessageIt is a bit heavy weight, but OTOH it works for all the needs
and protocols. ?WSDL may give you the WSDL but what if that
WSDL had imported a schema? How do you get that?

Moving forward, the mostly wide use of WS-MetadataExchange
will be to get policies. Yes a ?Policies hack would make
it work for SOAP/HTTP (as long as its not using the SOAP
Response MEP) but what about other protocols?

So IMO the price of WS-MetadataExchange is reasonable for what
it enables: dynamic discovery of metadata.

Sanjiva.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler)
To: Savas Parastatidis ; www-ws-arch@w3.org
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 3:45 AM
Subject: RE: Requesting WSDL Files


Hmmm.  Looks like a pretty heavyweight mechanism for such a simple task.
Although you're right that it's not fully general, it seems to me the simple
"?wsdl" HTTP method gets the 80-20 ... and it sure is simple.

-----Original Message-----
From: Savas Parastatidis [mailto:Savas.Parastatidis@newcastle.ac.uk]
Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2004 4:37 PM
To: Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler); www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: 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?pull=/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?

Received on Friday, 2 July 2004 00:08:57 UTC