Web Services Description Language
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XML-based interface description language
Key facts
- Filename extension
- .wsdl
- Internet media type
- application/wsdl+xml
- Developed by
- World Wide Web Consortium
- Contained by
- XML
- Standard
- 2.0 Recommendation
via Wikipedia infobox
~7 min read
Encyclopedic overview
The Web Services Description Language (WSDL /ˈwɪz dəl/) is an XML-based interface description language that is used for describing the functionality offered by a web service. The acronym is also used for any specific WSDL description of a web service (also referred to as a WSDL file), which provides a machine-readable description of how the service can be called, what parameters it expects, and what data structures it returns. Therefore, its purpose is roughly like a type signature in a programming language.
The latest version of WSDL, which became a W3C recommendation in 2007, is WSDL 2.0. The meaning of the acronym has changed from version 1.1 where the "D" stood for "Definition".
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Web Services Description Language” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.