Hi Pantelis, All,

There is a debate on WADL, indeed.

My idea is to use WADL to improve the documentation of the services by being
able to directly asking the service of the functionality it supports.  On
the other hand, there should be a manually edited WADL document, which
should serve as a specification of the OpenTox API.  The two can be compared
and eventually be used to automatically tell how well the specific service
implementation is compatible with the API.

Regarding automatic code generation from the WADL, I think we can ignore
this for the time being.

We can do the same by specifying the service description by  OWL as well,
and having a look at WADL scheme is useful  anyway.

Best regards,
Nina


On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 7:12 PM, chung <chvng at mail.ntua.gr> wrote:

> Hi all,
>   There is some debate on the net on whether or not WADL is useful or
> not (I personally tend to believe it is), however it is supposed to be
> designed for RESTful web services. I'm only a bit reluctant to accept
> auto-generated XML descriptions of the services. Maybe we should give it
> a try and discuss on our experience with it.
>
> Best regards,
> Pantelis, Hampos
>
> On Wed, 2010-08-25 at 17:55 +0300, Nina Jeliazkova wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 4:50 PM, Christoph Helma <helma at in-silico.ch>
> wrote:
> >
> > > Excerpts from Nina Jeliazkova's message of Mon Aug 23 15:37:23 +0200
> 2010:
> > > > All,
> > > >
> > > > Related to  the efforts to improve the current documentation of
> OpenTox
> > > > API,  I would like to propose using WADL for documenting OpenTox REST
> > > > services.
> > > >
> > > > WADL offers unified way of providing information about the resources,
> > > > methods, query parameters and return codes.  See
> > > > https://wadl.dev.java.net/wadl20061109.pdf .
> > > >
> > > > This might be used in several ways :
> > > >
> > > > 1) Generate manually WADL description of services, according to the
> > > > documented API.  WADL has a relatively simple XML schema, it could be
> > > then
> > > > run trough XSLT to generate HTML / PDF for documentation.  This is
> best
> > >  to
> > > > be hosted on a version control system to easily track changes.
> > > >
> > > > 2) Services should provide WADL description of themselves , on -H
> > > > Accept:application/vnd.sun.wadl+xml
> > > >
> > > > 3) It could be used to automatically generate clients (similar to
> WSDL),
> > > but
> > > > this is outside of the scope of this proposal.
> > > >
> > > > Implementation:  Restlet has straightforward support for WADL
> > > >
> http://wiki.restlet.org/docs_2.0/13-restlet/28-restlet/72-restlet.html .
> > > > Hope there are Ruby libraries as well.
> > >
> > > My first impression is, that WADL gets little attention in the Ruby
> > > community. With a quick search I have found no library that makes an
> > > reliable impression. WADL seems to be also controversial in the
> > > REST community (http://bitworking.org/news/193/Do-we-need-WADL). My
> > > impression is that WADL is deeply rooted in Java culture, other
> cultures
> > > would approach things differently ;-).
> > >
> > > If it is about documentation, why don't we document in OWL-DL (e.g. in
> > > analogy to algorithm respresentation)? This seems to be more consistent
> > > with the rest of our framework.
> > >
> >
> >
> > In fact this was my initial idea while on the plane to Boston :)  I had
> even
> > started some opentox-rest.owl.  But then saw the restlet WADL support and
> it
> > was lot easier to use existing XML schema than developing our own.
> >
> > Both approaches are actually not mutually exclusive, we can generate
> OWL-DL
> > based on WADL ideas.
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Nina
> >
> >
> > >
> > > Best regards,
> > > Christoph
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Development mailing list
> > > Development at opentox.org
> > > http://www.opentox.org/mailman/listinfo/development
> > >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
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>



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Dr. Nina Jeliazkova
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