Monday, May 09, 2005

Service Descriptions - Just the docs?

Couple of interesting posts: Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - On Replacing WSDL with Something Simpler and Mark Baker- ongoing - SMEX-D.

Both make the point that having an interface language for services should not do very much. From my POV I want primarily a means of getting accurate documentation on the interface (and also providing it to consumers of services). For all its warts Javadoc was a great step forward as it provided a way for developers to provide documentation will minimal effort. Until Javadoc the best examples of standard docs that I had experienced had been man pages, and some Lisp environments.

For services to be propagated widely there is a need to provide documentation that is easily created and kept up to date. Perhaps this is the starting point for a service description?

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