Wednesday 21 May 2008

REST WADL - tools and information

I'm interested to use REST or REST-like web services within a traditional thick client (as well as AJAX web apps) - using WADL to describe them (from existing services) and tools to automatically generate client API code (in a variety of languages).

Standards:
  • JAX-RS (JSR 311)

Digging around, I come across some interesting articles and blogs, including:

REST Describe and REST Compile:

Thomas Steiner's blog http://blog.tomayac.de/index.php?date=2007-03-12&time=17:11:27&perma=Automatic+Multi+Lang.html describing two tools to be developed.


Java.Net resources:

Other resources and blogs:

http://blogs.msdn.com/dotnetinterop/archive/2008/02/06/wadl-and-wsdl-and-rest-oh-my.aspx

An article on REST WADL http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid26_gci1265367,00.html

Blog by William Martinez Pomares with interesting follow up discussion http://acoscomp.com/wblog//index.php/a/2007/06/10/wadl_rest_and_wsdl


REST Describe and REST Compile tools:

Trying the on-line REST Describe on an existing web service I'd published previously showed promising results.

The current status of REST Compile is that is supports:
  • Java
  • PHP5
  • Ruby
  • Python

but .Net is not provided as yet.

2 comments:

Jerome Louvel said...

Hi Louis,

We also have WADL support in Restlet. See the Javadocs for details.

We offer both configuration based on existing WADL documents as well as dynamic generation of WADL from existing code...

Best regards,
Jerome

LouisB said...

Thanks Jerome, I'll be sure to check that out.

An update from my part - c# .Net 3.5 code generation has now been added to the google rest describe project, which can be found here:

http://code.google.com/p/rest-api-code-gen/

cheers!