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Hi Guys : It seems like the SOAP/WSDL world was very high on generating objects from data models, but I cannot tell wether the REST approach to web services favors the same approach. In my opinion, it seems as though JSON is emerging as the new common, native object format for most languages, thus obviating any need for language specific APIs. However, I'm new to the web services game.

Thus my question is : Are there tools which can autogenerate REST client side objects for us? And secondarily, is it customary in the web-services world, to provide client side objects for dealing with REST data (as is neccessary for dealing with SOAP data) ?

jayunit100
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What the "REST world" doesn't quite have in the same way as the "SOAP world" is a service description language like WSDL. At least, it's not quite as uniform.

  • There is of course HTML. Behind REST is the Web, and it would be unfair to dismiss HTML, since it has precisely the purpose of describing what you can do with the service. The downside is that it's not very computer-friendly in its most common form. Hence, there is no html2java that will turn your forms into objects. In addition, the programming model would be quite different to remote objects, which tools like wsdl2java tend to incur.
  • There is WADL, but it's not necessarily wide-spread. There is a wadl2java tool (see this question too perhaps).
  • It also depends on what you call a "REST" web service: does it really make proper use of the hypermedia, or is it just sending XML/JSON to a nice-looking URL.
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Bruno
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  • Great clarification. I will wait to see what else pops up but this is certainly very helpful and likely, the closest thing to a right answer. – jayunit100 Jan 20 '12 at 22:42