Yahoo! WebService WSDL

[Michael Salisbury]

Hi all,

I'm an engineer on the Yahoo! WebServices team. As you may know we
recently launched some webservices at http://developer.yahoo.net.
We've got a set of REST APIs for accessing various search results.

While we do have a schema for the result XML for the calls, we have
no such specification for the requests. David Orchard proposed a
WSDL 2.0 spec for one of the services at
http://www.pacificspirit.com/blog/2005/03/02/yahoo_search_web_service_in_wsd
l_20

I'd love to be able to support a spec like this, but we've got a
chicken-and-egg problem. It's difficult to produce WSDL files when
I've got no tools to verify that they're accurate, and it's difficult
to build WSDL tools when there are no examples to try them on.

So I've come here in hopes of breaking the stalemate. How would you
recommend we produce and maintain WSDL specs for our services? Are
there tools for generating and verifying such specs? Are there tools
for creating client stubs for calling services with WSDL specs?
Remember, these are HTTP REST APIs, not SOAP.

Thanks!

-- Mike Salisbury
Yahoo! WebServices

[Jonathan Marsh]

Michael,

Thanks for your interest in WSDL 2.0. In regard to your chicken-and-egg
problem, that is part of the process this Working Group goes through to
produce a finished spec. We're in "Last Call" stage which means we're
responding to public comments and making corresponding fixes in the WSDL
2.0 spec. After that we enter "Candidate Recommendation" phase which we
use to resolve our own chicken-and-egg dilemma - verifying the spec
through implementation while maintaining a stable enough spec to
implement. Part of that phase will likely be some early WSDL 2.0 tools
and other implementations. This process gradually shifts the balance
from spec to implementations, and the end goal we all hope for is a
solid, stable, implementable spec and lots of high-quality
implementations. We're just not at the end of that process yet.

- Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
On Behalf Of Michael Salisbury
Sent: Monday, March 21, 2005 4:44 PM
Subject: Yahoo! WebService WSDL
Hi all,
I'm an engineer on the Yahoo! WebServices team. As you may know we
recently launched some webservices at http://developer.yahoo.net.
We've got a set of REST APIs for accessing various search results.
While we do have a schema for the result XML for the calls, we have no
such specification for the requests. David Orchard proposed a WSDL
2.0 spec for one of the services at
http://www.pacificspirit.com/blog/2005/03/02/yahoo_search_web_service_
in_wsdl_20
I'd love to be able to support a spec like this, but we've got a
chicken-and-egg problem. It's difficult to produce WSDL files when
I've got no tools to verify that they're accurate, and it's difficult
to build WSDL tools when there are no examples to try them on.
So I've come here in hopes of breaking the stalemate. How would you
recommend we produce and maintain WSDL specs for our services? Are
there tools for generating and verifying such specs? Are there tools
for creating client stubs for calling services with WSDL specs?
Remember, these are HTTP REST APIs, not SOAP.
Thanks!
-- Mike Salisbury
Yahoo! WebServices

[Dan Diephouse]

Post by Michael Salisbury
So I've come here in hopes of breaking the stalemate. How would you
recommend we produce and maintain WSDL specs for our services? Are
there tools for generating and verifying such specs? Are there tools
for creating client stubs for calling services with WSDL specs?
Remember, these are HTTP REST APIs, not SOAP.

If you're looking at using only wsdl 2.0, I don't know there a lot of
tools out there. I know the Axis 2 people have started on some Java
stuff to parse WSDL 2.0, but I don't think they have any stub generation
yet.

For my /SOAP/ serivces which have a WSDL 1.1 descriptor, I select
several tools (say .NET, Axis, etc), generate stubs and write tests
which use my service. I would recommend the same, but their are very few
tools if any that handle WSDL 2.0/REST at this point. A WSDL 2.0
description for Yahoo, while neato, doesn't seem very useful to me
yet... If you really wanted client stub generation for your users, you'd
be best off making some kind of WSDL 1.1/SOAP gateway IMO :-\.

- Dan

[Arthur Ryman]

Michael,

I'm very interested in supporting your use of WSDL 2.0. It would be great
if you could help us get this right. There are two ways you can help.

1. We are building up a Test Suite at W3C [1]. At present we don't have
any REST test cases. If you can contribute some that conform to the WSDL
2.0 HTTP binding, that would be great. Just post your test cases to this
list and I'll add them. This will help us get the HTTP binding right.

2. There is also implementation work being planned. There is a new Apache
project being proposed for WSDL 2.0. It will include a parser and
validator. The tools will also be integrated into Eclipse as part of the
Web Tools Platform (WTP) project [2]. Both projects would welcome
participation from Yahoo.

[1] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/2002/ws/desc/test-suite/
[2] http://eclipse.org/webtools/index.html

Arthur Ryman,
Rational Desktop Tools Development

phone: [phone], TL 969-3077
assistant: [phone], TL 969-2411
fax: [phone], TL 969-4920
mobile: [phone], text: ***@fido.ca
intranet: http://labweb.torolab.ibm.com/DRY6/



"Michael Salisbury" <***@yahoo-inc.com>
Sent by: www-ws-desc-***@w3.org
03/21/2005 07:43 PM

To
<www-ws-***@w3.org>
cc

Subject
Yahoo! WebService WSDL










Hi all,

I'm an engineer on the Yahoo! WebServices team. As you may know we
recently launched some webservices at http://developer.yahoo.net.
We've got a set of REST APIs for accessing various search results.

While we do have a schema for the result XML for the calls, we have
no such specification for the requests. David Orchard proposed a
WSDL 2.0 spec for one of the services at
http://www.pacificspirit.com/blog/2005/03/02/yahoo_search_web_service_in_wsd

l_20

I'd love to be able to support a spec like this, but we've got a
chicken-and-egg problem. It's difficult to produce WSDL files when
I've got no tools to verify that they're accurate, and it's difficult
to build WSDL tools when there are no examples to try them on.

So I've come here in hopes of breaking the stalemate. How would you
recommend we produce and maintain WSDL specs for our services? Are
there tools for generating and verifying such specs? Are there tools
for creating client stubs for calling services with WSDL specs?
Remember, these are HTTP REST APIs, not SOAP.

Thanks!

-- Mike Salisbury
Yahoo! WebServices

[Michael Salisbury]

Arthur,

We'd certainly like to help this process, but currently we don't have the
resources to work
on these WSDL 2.0 HTTP test cases. I hope in the future we will be able to
focus more on
these areas. We'll continue to watch these lists for any developments.

-Mike Salisbury
Yahoo! Web Services Team


-----Original Message-----
From: Arthur Ryman [mailto:***@ca.ibm.com]
Sent: Monday, March 28, 2005 3:17 PM
To: Michael Salisbury
Cc: www-ws-***@w3.org; www-ws-desc-***@w3.org
Subject: Re: Yahoo! WebService WSDL



Michael,

I'm very interested in supporting your use of WSDL 2.0. It would be great if
you could help us get this right. There are two ways you can help.

1. We are building up a Test Suite at W3C [1]. At present we don't have any
REST test cases. If you can contribute some that conform to the WSDL 2.0
HTTP binding, that would be great. Just post your test cases to this list
and I'll add them. This will help us get the HTTP binding right.

2. There is also implementation work being planned. There is a new Apache
project being proposed for WSDL 2.0. It will include a parser and validator.
The tools will also be integrated into Eclipse as part of the Web Tools
Platform (WTP) project [2]. Both projects would welcome participation from
Yahoo.

[1] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/2002/ws/desc/test-suite/
[2] http://eclipse.org/webtools/index.html

Arthur Ryman,
Rational Desktop Tools Development

phone: [phone], TL 969-3077
assistant: [phone], TL 969-2411
fax: [phone], TL 969-4920
mobile: [phone], text: ***@fido.ca
intranet: http://labweb.torolab.ibm.com/DRY6/



"Michael Salisbury" <***@yahoo-inc.com>
Sent by: www-ws-desc-***@w3.org


03/21/2005 07:43 PM


To
<www-ws-***@w3.org>

cc

Subject
Yahoo! WebService WSDL










Hi all,

I'm an engineer on the Yahoo! WebServices team. As you may know we
recently launched some webservices at http://developer.yahoo.net.
We've got a set of REST APIs for accessing various search results.

While we do have a schema for the result XML for the calls, we have
no such specification for the requests. David Orchard proposed a
WSDL 2.0 spec for one of the services at
http://www.pacificspirit.com/blog/2005/03/02/yahoo_search_web_service_in_wsd
l_20

I'd love to be able to support a spec like this, but we've got a
chicken-and-egg problem. It's difficult to produce WSDL files when
I've got no tools to verify that they're accurate, and it's difficult
to build WSDL tools when there are no examples to try them on.

So I've come here in hopes of breaking the stalemate. How would you
recommend we produce and maintain WSDL specs for our services? Are
there tools for generating and verifying such specs? Are there tools
for creating client stubs for calling services with WSDL specs?
Remember, these are HTTP REST APIs, not SOAP.

Thanks!

-- Mike Salisbury
Yahoo! WebServices