Automatically Generating WSDL Files

One of the best aspects of WSDL is that you rarely have to create WSDL files from scratch. A whole host of tools currently exists for transforming existing services into WSDL descriptions. You can then choose to use these WSDL files as is or manually tweak them with your favorite text editor. In the discussion that follows, we explore the WSDL generation tool provided by GLUE.

Tip

If you create WSDL files from scratch or tweak WSDL files generated by a tool, it is a good idea to validate your final WSDL documents. You can download a WSDL validator from http://pocketsoap.com/wsdl/. This package requires that you have an XSLT engine and the zvonSchematron (http://www.zvon.org), but installation only takes a few minutes. Once installed, the validator is well worth the effort and creates nicely formatted HTML reports indicating WSDL errors and warnings.

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