How non-SOAP (REST WS, HTTP WS) web service clients knows about the structure of the response?
I mean, is there a formal way?
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How non-SOAP (REST WS, HTTP WS) web service clients knows about the structure of the response?
I mean, is there a formal way?
No.
The “provider” of the service needs to provide some form of documentation for that service – what parameters are possible, what the response will look like.
This is one of the major drawbacks of non-SOAP services…
There are a few initiatives like
WADL(Web Application Description Language) – but those are far from widely accepted and thus not really a valid alternative to WSDL.Microsoft has also extended REST to include metadata used in WCF REST and the WCF Data Services to allow .NET client-side proxies that “know” about the REST calls and the parameters – but again, that’s not really an industry standard that everyone follows.