On the Origin of Services Using RIDDL for Description, Evolution and Composition of RESTful Services

Abstract

WSDL as a description language serves as the foundation for a host of technologies ranging from semantic annotation to composition and evolution. Although WSDL is well understood and in widespread use, it has its shortcomings which are partly imposed by the way how the SOAP protocol works and is used. Cloud computing fostered the rise of Representational State Transfer (REST), a return to arguably simpler but more flexible ways to expose services solely through the HTTP protocol. For RESTful services many achievements that have been acquired have to be rethought and reapplied. We perceive that one of the biggest hurdles is the lack of a dedicated and simple yet powerful language to describe RESTful services. In this paper we want to introduce RIDDL, a flexible and extensible XML based language that not only allows to describe services but also covers the basic requirements of service composition and evolution to provide a clean foundation for further developments.