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</resource>
</resources>
Now, to be fair, the WADL whitepaper never mentions the term REST a single time. However,
this code example uses the terms resourceand representationas if there is something RESTful
going on. This is not RESTful. This is straight RPC.
It is not RESTful to provide a service that does not use hypermedia as the engine of applica-
tion state, and rather acquiesces to a total reliance on out-of-band negotiation and code gen-
eration in order to communicate successfully with the service. The interface is completely de-
scribed in terms of operations and parameters.
It's good to know about WADL, as it may be useful in situations where, for example, you want
to provide some machine-readable description for test automation. That's actually a pretty in-
teresting use for such a description. It's less clear how useful it is for something like docu-
mentation generation, as there is no room for commentary in the format, and you may as well
generate documentation from a format more specifically suited to that purpose, and closer to
the code itself.
Again, I have nothing against WADL in particular, but if you're a purist, it isn't RESTful.
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