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Another Spec About to Hatch


Web Services Description Language to get interface inheritance

By P J Connolly
July 1, 2006 —  WSDL 2.0 is getting closer to reality. Later this month at IBM’s Toronto Software Lab, a dozen or so software companies will sit down for the first of at least two events designed to validate their implementations of the spec, which the W3C currently classifies as a “Candidate Recommendation.”

WSDL 2.0A number of changes from version 1.1 are in the works. A new feature in the 2.0 spec is the concept of interface inheritance, which allows WSDL developers to define interfaces and aggregate them into larger ones. Also new to WSDL 2.0 is simplified message construction, relying on schema to perform the heavy lifting.

One obstacle for the W3C effort is that the current version of WSDL is usable. According to Jonathan Marsh, co-chair of the W3C’s Web Services Description Working Group, “The problem is that WSDL 1.1 has been around for a while, and is good enough for many purposes.” However, that’s given the working group a chance to get WSDL right. According to Marsh, “Most of the committee members felt that the important part of WSDL 2.0 was to make it as technically accurate…as clean as possible.”

The working group event in July—another is tentatively planned for this fall—is the software equivalent of a plugfest, Marsh asserted. “Having bodies in the room makes it easier to have different implementations talk to each other and find out what are the bugs,” he noted. Although bugs sometimes result from implementers’ mistakes, even at this late stage “often they also find something that wasn’t completely clear in the spec” that a little editing can fix.

Marsh is “quite pleased with the level of review the spec has gotten, and the level of clarity in the spec.” But there are some issues that may, or may not, result in further revisions to WSDL. Marsh noted, “The exact interaction of WSDL and policy is something that has created some friction in the past.” At the least, he said, “there’s some coordination [between description and policy] that can go on.”

HTTP binding is another open issue, with substantial additional features added to the WSDL 2.0 binding, said Marsh. “The goal was not to provide a full HTTP description language, but just to have the kinds of interactions you would normally do in SOAP… [also] exposed through an HTTP Web service.”

Overall, Marsh believes the working group has handled its responsibilities well. “I think we’re in pretty good shape with WSDL,” he said.


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