[DAS2] WADL

[Steve Chervitz]

As I mentioned in the weekly meeting notes:

> sc: no writeback related work, but attended the JavaOne meeting last
> week. Some things of interest to our work:
>
> 1) Presentation on the ATOM protocol and REST in general. Mentioned
>    something called WADL that is a REST-based web service to automate
>    client-side interactions. Seemed more general that ATOM since one
>    can use it to implement ATOM.

WADL stands for Web Application Description Language and is a fairly recent
invention, so it's not in widespread use.

Documentation can be found at
http://research.sun.com/techrep/2006/abstract-153.html

Here's the abstract:

> An increasing number of Web-based enterprises (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Flickr -
> to name but a few) are developing HTTP-based applications that provide access
> to their internal data using XML. Typically these applications are described
> using a combination of textual protocol descriptions combined with XML
> schema-based data format descriptions; WADL is designed to provide a machine
> processable protocol description format for use with such HTTP-based Web
> applications, especially those using XML.

I haven't looked at it enough to tell whether it would be useful for DAS
applications. The DAS protocol does some things that are targetted by WADL,
like defining resource relationships. But other parts of WADL might be of
use for DAS, such as describing relationships between DAS servers, or
between DAS servers and other non-DAS resources.

It may be possible to describe DAS using WADL, but I haven't tried.

Steve