Discovering and exploring RESTful services

The topic of discovering RESTful services has a long and complicated history. The HTTP specification states that a resource should be self-descriptive and that it should be identified uniquely by a URI. Dependent resources should be linked by the dependency using their own unique URIs. Discovering a RESTful service means navigating from one service to another, following the links it provides.

After the invasion of classical SOAP web services, the community got used to having a service described in a separate XML-based resource, named Web Services Description Language (WSDL). It describes the interface of the service, as well as other metadata such as security policy and endpoint location URI. Classical ...

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