Watching the debate between Tim Bray and JJ Dubray on WSDL, I don’t think that the question is whether WSDL sucks or not. The question is how bad it sucks. Keeping aside the theory behind WSDL, just talk to developers who are tasked to coming up with a WSDL for their services for their horror stories. Or talk to developers (at least those that interacted with) who build WSDL based tools. Or just talk to those using WSDL for other more advanced features like security.
On WSDL
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Yes, I don’t disagree with what you are saying, though again,
a) I think there is a need for a major upgrade of the understanding of how to use these technologies. It looks to me that people like Tim or Steve have lost touch with this understanding. I can see it in my everyday life too.
b) it s—- in reference to what? what is the alternative to WSDL. Give me a better one and I’ll use it.
At the end of the day I have a job to do, so I can complain forever about how bad it s—- and use it as an excuse not to do my job, or I can byte the bullet and use it.
For me this is the byte code level. I don’t know that many people that write at that level often. They probably will say it s—-. Another analogy is JavaScript vs GWT. JavaScript s—- badly, cross-browser JavaScript s—- even more. So what do we do? We get rid of it? no. We create GWT.
This is what is illarious in this debate, some people are on a mission to kill WS-*, this is all you care, nothing less, nothing more. It does not matter to these poeple what REST can do or cannot do. Well I have news for you that mission is doomed to fail because:
a) there are too many projects that use WS-*
b) REST has no viable alternative to offer,
So where do we go from there?
JJ-
I agree that there is no alternative. Unfortunately, those that do have success with WSDL are almost always using it by letting a tool translate their programming language interfaces into/out of WSDL. In the absence of an alternative, this is what everyone settled down to.