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Team Comment on the "Web Application Description Language" Submission

W3C is pleased to receive the Web Application Description Language from SUN Microsystems Inc.

The use of services on the Web evolved from "screen scraping" to applications where HTTP URI identify real services that are sending content in different dedicated formats, like XML, JSON, etc… It also evolved from services mainly used by humans to services targeted as computer programs.

To allow computers to reuse those services, some form of documentation is provided (text description, XML Schema or other grammars for structured languages, etc…). For SOAP-based services, WSDL is a version of such machine-processable description of services.

The "Web Application Description Language" submission (WADL) allows the description of HTTP-based services, putting the emphasis on the basic description of those services from the HTTP interaction standpoint, while allowing different grammars and formalizations to describe the payloads and parameters used during the interaction. WADL also gives examples on how to use grammars like RelaxNG or XML Schema.

WADL relates to the following W3C Activities and Groups:

XML Schema

WADL uses XML Schema as one possible mechanism for defining the structure of message payloads

SAWSDL

SAWSDL is used to describe additional semantic in WSDL descriptions and XML Schema definitions.

Next Steps

As of today, W3C has no plans to take up work based on this Submission. We encourage people interested by this work to discuss on the public-web-http-desc@w3.org Mailing List [public archive].