RESTful services description languages

Steve Vinoski posted an interesting reflection about the use of description languages on RESTful services. I have to agree 200% with Steve, WSDL and 1.1 and simply horrendous. Although WSDL 2.0 drastically improves in the modeling aspects of the services it does not solve one of the fundamental problems of its predecessors which tightly couple web Services with RPC and object oriented models. This gets even worse when you are working with ESBs or Integration Servers that are highly dependent on WSDL, sometimes you get the impression you are writing a big object oriented programL.  However, I still think that some sort of description language is really beneficial in a lot of scenarios such as service-endpoint discovery, policy description, service management and versioning. On those scenarios, the use of languages such as RDF, WADL, Atom or even tools such as Power Point or Excel can provide a better and more flexible solution than WSDL.

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