Bah! The only thing that e.g. WSDL brings is that the "contract" for the service can be baked into the legal contract between partnering organizations. For big

Bah! The only thing that e.g. WSDL brings is that the "contract" for the service can be baked into the legal contract between partnering organizations. For big paranoid companies where people need a lot of CYA, that can be a big point. Good RESTful approaches are actually self-documenting. As the example from my recent talk on REST at SD West shows, it's really easy to support human discoverable (i.e., well documented) RESTful solutions. In my example, hitting the root resource returns a page (in html or text) that shows how to interact with the resource with actual examples. That's way better then some horribly verbose WSDL that somebody is going to have to look up.