Disadvantages of using webMethods developer to generate wsdl

, ,
1

Hi,

I was searching on the wmusers and came across with some threads which talks about not using developer to generate WSDL and there were reasons for those arguments but could anyone be specific what are the things that webMethods developer lacks in generating WSDL.
Mark really looking forward for your comments. And what would be the best tool to generate WSDL.

2

For starters …

  1. Only one web service operation per WSDL
  2. Embedded schemas don’t allow modularization of WSDL by importing XML schemas into the types section.
  3. Because of 1 and 2, no ability to reuse XML schema definitions across operations.
  4. No control over generated “container” message type names.
  5. WSDL-generator lacks awareness of best practices as represented by WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 (not to mention 1.1)
  6. No ability to describe SOAP Header elements or corresponding Header Fault elements. Most WS-* specifications rely on SOAP header elements.
  7. Apart from using ServiceNet, no built-in ability to host generated WSDL’s or to generate WSDL’s on the fly such that they can be queried by SOAP clients.

IS Release 7.x will apparently introduce brand spankin’ new functionality to address many of these issues which have existed for the last four years. That is good news and, frankly, essential to the survival of IS as a viable solution in the SOA / web service market.

The bad news is that I am expecting the upgrade from IS 6.x to 7.x to be fairly major which means most existing customers would not see any benefits from these changes until the second half of 2007.

Generating WSDL from any development tool runs the risk that implementation specific details will find their way into the WSDL which is supposed to be an implementation-independent description of a service interface.

Rather than use coding tools to generate an interface from existing service implementation, best practices suggest that WSDL be created first based on service candidates derived from analysis.

Modeling tools supporting WSDL-first are XML Spy Enterprise and the new SOA toolset from Eclipse. There may be others as well and I would suspect that Rational will provide some help in this are shortly if it does not already.

Mark

3

Thanks Mark that really help me making decision. Tell me something I was talking to my .NET developer and he told me that .NET’s default is SOAP Document when creating the web Service. Is SOAP Document and SOAP MSG same ?

4

SOAP document/literal (doc/lit) is sometimes called SOAP-MSG by various webMethods documents and software features. Lots and lots written here about that subject.