Using WADL Specifications to Develop and Maintain REST Client Applications

Abstract

Service orientation is one of the most popular paradigms for developing modular distributed software systems. In spite of the substantial research effort dedicated to the development of methods and tools to support SOAP-based service-oriented application development, in practice, RESTful services have surpassed SOAP-based services in popularity and adoption, primarily due to the simplicity of their invocation. However, poor adoption of REST specification standards and lack of systematic development tools have given rise to many, more or less compliant, variants of the Restful style constraints, which undermine the evolvability and interoperability of these systems. In this paper, we describe a tool that supports the systematization of RESTful application development, through the use of semi-automatically constructed WADL interface specifications, without compromising the ease of the overall practice. We illustrate the use and advantages of our tool on real-world REST APIs. Additionally, we comment on how REST APIs are documented, especially in comparison to the auto-generated WADLs.