Language to communicate with Web Services

Introduction

Laymen explanation

If you have used cloud and you are a programmer, you might sometime want to use web service in programmatic manner. For example, consider a web service is providing current data and time. You want to write a mobile app which will automatically set the mobile device time. This mobile app should be able to access time web service. To enable this, web service provider should explain 'how to access the time service'.

Technical explanation

Web APIs are meant to enable application to access web services. WSDL (Web Service Description Language) , REST facilitates way to publish Web APIs.

WSDL vs REST

REST is clean. WSDL often depends on other tools to parse it out, or to automatically build functions for your application to benefit from the services offered by the WSDL. REST also has the benefit of being much more natural by taking advantage of HTTP and not really relying on anything more. One you get SOAP into the mix and the many other acronyms that go along with WSDL, you end up with a lot on your hands.

Reference

http://www.service-architecture.com/articles/web-services/web_services_description_language_wsdl.html

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/229797/why-exactly-would-i-want-to-use-a-wsdl-to-describe-a-web-service

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6830581/rest-web-service-wsdl