What is WSDL?
WSDL is a standard, structured way of describing Soap messages and Web Services. The Soap Toolkit is dependent upon WSDL to create and interpret Soap Messages, so a WSDL file is required for any Soap Toolkit 2.0 client or server. If you want a Soap Toolkit 2.0 client to communicate with a Soap Server that doesn’t supply a WSDL, you must create a WSDL file that describes the messages the Soap Services expects. I find the easiest way to do this is to create a dummy interface in Microsoft® Visual Basic® that matches what the server expects and use WSDLGen on the VB dll to create the WSDL file. You may also create the WSDL file by hand. If you want a non-WSDL enabled Soap client to talk to a Soap Toolkit 2.0 Service, just use the WSDL file as a description of what the Soap message needs to look like and translate this to whatever mechanism the client uses to create Soap messages.
WSDL stands for Web Services Description Language. WSDL provides the definition of the interface for a Web service and is one of the key components in enabling loose coupling.This course covers the process of describing Web services with WSDL. Composing of a service description and defining the interface are facets of WSDL that are covered in this course.
WSDL is the Web Service Description Language. It provides a formal description of a web service, much like CORBA’s IDL. The WSDL file is all you need to know how to call the web service; toolkits can generate proxy code from a WSDL file directly. The official WSDL definition is at http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl.
WSDL is the Web Service Description Language, and it is implemented as a specific XML vocabulary. While it’s very much more complex than what can be described here, there are two important aspects to WSDL with which you should be aware. First, WSDL provides instructions to consumers of Web Services to describe the layout and contents of the SOAP packets the Web Service intends to issue. It’s an interface description document, of sorts. And second, it isn’t intended that you read and interpret the WSDL. Rather, WSDL should be processed by machine, typically to generate proxy source code (.NET) or create dynamic proxies on the fly (the SOAP Toolkit or Web Service Behavior).
