wadl
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Summary	Web Application Description Language - Specification and Tools
Categories	None
License	Common Development and Distribution License
Owner(s)	mhadley

Welcome to the Web Application Description Language (WADL) project at Java.net. This project is under the CDDL license. Here you'll find the language specification and tools for working with WADL descriptions of Web applications.

Project Contents

wadl2java

A tool that generates client side stubs from WADL files. May be used from the command line or as an Apache Ant plug-in, see the wadl2java documentation for full details.

wadl2java_yahoo

A sample project that uses the wadl2java tool to create stubs for the Yahoo News Search Service. Includes a simple main method that uses the generated stubs to query for the latest Java news.

Other Resources

wadl_documentation.xsl

Mark Nottingham maintains an XSLT stylesheet that will transform a WADL document into a human-readable documentation.

Project Goals

This project aims to accomplish the following:

• Improve the existing wadl2java tool
• Collect a library of WADL files for existing Web applications, these will serve to:
  • Demonstrate the use of WADL to describe existing services
  • Provide test files for WADL tools
• Add new tools for languages other than Java
• Add new tools for developing server-side code from WADL descriptions
• Add new tools for creating WADL descriptions of deployed services
• Integration of existing and new tools into IDEs and application servers to simplify their use

Contributing to the Project

Contributions are welcome in the following areas:

• Suggestions for improvements to the current tools. These can be in the form of:
  • Bug reports
  • Feature requests
  • Source code patches
• Suggestions for improvements to the WADL specification
• Submission of WADL files for existing Web applications
• Submission of new tools
• Documentation or tutorials on the use of WADL or the tools under development here.

WADL Specification

History (current specification at top):

• 20061109 - Specification (PDF), RelaxNG schema and W3C XML schema. Updated with support for resource type and numerous fixes and clarifications, more information here.
• 20060802 - Specification (PDF), RelaxNG schema and W3C XML schema. Updated with support for describing links from representations to resources, including human-readable documentation and reworked resource and parameter description, see Marc's blog entry for details.
• 20060424 - Sun Labs Technical Report
• 20051116 - Initial draft (PDF)

Project Build Instructions

You need Apache Ant 1.6 or later to build the code contained within this project. Java SE 5 or later is required. First check out the workspace:

$ svn checkout https://wadl.dev.java.net/svn/wadl/trunk/source wadl --username yourid

where yourid is your java.net user id.

Go to the wadl4java directory and build the project:

$ cd wadl/wadl2java
$ ant jar

The project also comes with NetBeans project files, if you use other IDEs, please contribute the project settings to us.

Once built, you can test using a sample project:

$ cd ../wadl2java_yahoo
$ ant run

You should see a list of recent news stories related to Java. See the wadl2java documentation for a description of how to use the tool within a project and examine the build.xml file for an example of using the wadl2java Ant task.