Re: Usefulness of WSDL

["Tim Bray" <[e-mail]>]

Lisa, you might it useful to pull a copy of the WSDL spec and invest a
half-hour in just looking at it.  It's really hard to understand, and
my feeling is that it's an extremely poor piece of design.

I can remember I was once speaking at a big Java conference, maybe 600
people in audience; I asked for a show of hands as to who was using
WSDL.  A large majority of hands went up.  Then I asked how many
thought they actually understood it.  Maybe 2 or 3 hands.  How many
liked it?  Another couple of hands.

Based on experience with WS-*, I suspect that in general any IETF spec
that requires the use of WSDL will be expensive to implement and
fragile in deployment.   Among other things, a spec that's regarded as
difficult to understand should be avoided if there's a plausible
alternative.  -Tim