RESTful Java Web Services - Third Edition

Market adoption of WADL

Many like WADL for its simplicity and tooling support. It is easy to read, understand, and implement.

However, the software industry has not yet considered it to be an actual standard for describing RESTful web APIs. Further, WADL does not cover authentication constructs for REST APIs. Some vendors think that XML is not the right way to go for describing RESTful web APIs because of the complexity involved in parsing XMLs, particularly when used in mobile clients or in JavaScript clients.

With this, we end our discussion on WADL. In the next section, we will discuss RESTful API Modeling Language, which is a YAML-based language for describing RESTful APIs.