WSDL for SOAP - What about REST?

Question

Pretty new to WCF

I was browsing through various WCF Terminologies and seems stuck understanding this.

WSDL is used to describe the web service.

Currently, only SOAP based web services seems to have an associated WSDL while REST based services doesn't seem too.

Why?

Is it possible to generate WSDL for REST too?

Or are there any third party programs to do it ?

Answer 1

WADL is equivalent to WSDL for RESTful services

Answer 2

Since Microsoft .NET does not natively support WADL (WADL is WSDL for REST) providing a specific answer to your question is a bit difficult. That said, if you are interested in discovering more about RESTful services and WADL, you may want to consider experimenting with the open-source soapUI web service test utility (http://www.soapui.org/), which provides support for WADL.

Answer 3

The idea of codifying a RESTful API into a never-changing contract is antithetical to REST. Yes, WADL exists, but its purpose is to try and make REST more like SOAP, and with it destroy the primary benefit of REST: its evolvability.

If you feel like you want to use WADL, just use WSDL/SOAP instead.

Answer 4

You can use swagger.json as definitions for REST services.

you can check their github page for more information.

https://github.com/RSuter/NSwag