WSDL

Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based description language. This language was submitted to the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as the industry standard for describing Web services. The power of WSDL is derived from two main architectural principles: the ability to describe a set of business operations and the ability to separate the description into two basic units. These units are a description of the operations and the details of how the operation and the information associated with it are packaged.

A WSDL document defines services as collections of network endpoints, or ports. In WSDL, the abstract definition of endpoints and messages is separated from their concrete network deployment or data format bindings. This separation supports the reuse of abstract definitions: messages, which are abstract descriptions of exchanged data, and port types, which are abstract collections of operations. The concrete protocol and data format specifications for a particular port type constitutes a reusable binding. A port is defined by associating a network address with a reusable binding, and a collection of ports define a service. Therefore, a WSDL document is composed of several elements. See WSDL architecture for more information and examples of the WSDL elements.

When creating Web services for WebSphere Application Server, first have an implementation bean that includes a service endpoint interface. Then, you use the Java2WSDL command-line tool to create a WSDL file that defines the Web services. To learn more about how the WSDL file is used in the development process, see Developing Web services.

Related tasks
Developing Web services applications