Saturday, February 5, 2011

Downgrade! Convert Wsdl 2.0 to Wsdl 1.1 (Wsdl2Wsdl)

@YaronNaveh


Wsdl2Wsdl is Here!

Wsdl 2.0 never fulfilled its promises: It did not replace Wsdl 1.1 and soap stacks rarely support it. It did not became the Metadata standard for Rest based web services. And in an era where a service metadata can be summed up with a resource uri, Wsdl 2.0 is barely looked at as a simplification. All this is hardly Wsdl 2.0 fault. It's the timing. The backlash against Soap/Wsdl based services was far behind its point of no return in the period where Wsdl 2.0 was expected to get high adoption. It is not too risky to bet that Wsdl 2.0 will never be implemented by existing soap stacks, and Wcf is no exception.

And the sky is blue. So?
While service authors may elegantly ignore Wsdl 2, if you're on the consumer side you might need to consume a service which metadata is a Wsdl 2 document. Most chances are that your client stack does not support code generation from this version of Wsdl. This is an annoying interoperability problem.

Wsdl2Wsdl
I have written an online Wsdl 2 --> Wsdl 1 converter. While there are a number of Wsdl1 --> Wsdl 2 converters available, I have yet to find one in the opposite direction.
Wsdl2Wsdl provides you a url which dynamically converts the Wsdl per demand. This means you always get the live version of the wsdl.


Can I run Wsdl2Wsdl on my premise?
The current version of Wsdl2Wsdl is web based so if your Wsdl has some secrets / IP you should take this into consideration. I plan to open source it and ship an on premise version. You are welcome to contact me if you need this urgently.

Where is Wsdl2Wsdl?
It's hosted on my Azure account:

http://webservices20.cloudapp.net/wsdl2wsdl.html

Drop me a mail with any issue or feedback.

@YaronNaveh

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