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Looking For An Easy Way Out of WSDL


Sun’s Bray, Walsh propose alternatives

By Yvonne L. Lee
June 15, 2005 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Two of Sun’s sharpest engineers think that one of the bedrock specifications for Web services is too difficult to use, so they’ve proposed alternatives.

“If you print out the WSDL 2.0 specification, it comes to 140 pages or something like that,” said Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun and co-inventor of XML. “It’s not light reading. You’re not in Stephen King territory. It’s densely loaded with abstractions.”

XML standards architect Norman Walsh said he encountered difficulty when he tried to build a Web service and wanted to describe it.

“It was not clear to me at all where to start because it’s all very abstract. It’s designed to be flexible in every conceivable way,” he said.

The two said they felt the WSDL specification was trying to be too broad and applicable in too many different situations.

“It doesn’t presuppose that you’re actually using the Web; it doesn’t presuppose the basic client/server model that the Web is based on. It doesn’t presuppose that you’re transmitting via HTTP,” said Bray.

This, he said, takes away from the ease of use that builders have come to expect from the Web.

“There’s an important issue of psychology here,” said Bray, referring to one of the ways the Web is different from other software. “It’s the ‘view source effect,’ where you can look at a page and say that looks cool and figure out how they did it. Some of us think that low barrier to entry is very important. Some of us think simplicity is as important as generality.”

Not The Only Ones
As a result, the two have separately come up with alternatives, which are posted on their Weblogs. Bray pointed out that they are not the only attempts at replacing WSDL. Jim Webber and Savas Parastatidis issued the SOAP Service Description Language (SSDL) specification in February. The work on SSDL aims to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of Web service description when SOAP is assumed from the outset compared with the transfer-independent approach of WSDL. However, SSDL is actually five separate specifications and five separate frameworks, and Bray said such a specification would be too complex to simplify Web service description.


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