Ajax Girl

Thomas Steiner has released Google REST Describe, a GWT application, open-sourced, that groks WADL:

The application is based on the idea that creating a description for a Web Service should be a rather simple task given the information already contained in requests. Let’s take a very simple imaginary online bookmarking Web Service to make the idea clear:

http://bookmarks-online.com/api/v1/getBookmarks?userId=tom&tags=rest&limit=10

Simply by looking at the URI we can extract the following information:

• http://bookmarks-online.com: there is a Web Service at this base address.
• /api/v1/: this is the path to access the service components.
• getBookmarks: there is an operation called getBookmarks
• ?userId=tom&tags=rest&limit=10: it takes three arguments, userId, tags, and limit. When we have a closer look, we could guess that “userId” and “tags” are both strings, and that “limit” is an integer value.

And all this information just from one example request. This is basically what the Google REST Describe approach is based on. It takes an ideally complete list of URIs, analyzes the structure, does some type estimations, and afterwards creates an XML representation of the request.

(NOTE: This is not an official Google project)

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/google-rest-describe-wadl-toolkit