Welcome to the Web Application Description Language (WADL) project at Java.net. This project is under the CDDL license. Here you'll find the language specification and tools for working with WADL descriptions of Web applications.

WADL Specification

History (current specification at top):

• 20090831 - Specification, RelaxNG schema and W3C XML schema. Refactored description of responses and several other issue fixes, more information here.
• 20061109 - Specification (PDF), RelaxNG schema and W3C XML schema. Updated with support for resource type and numerous fixes and clarifications, more information here.
• 20060802 - Specification (PDF), RelaxNG schema and W3C XML schema. Updated with support for describing links from representations to resources, including human-readable documentation and reworked resource and parameter description, see Marc's blog entry for details.
• 20060424 - Sun Labs Technical Report
• 20051116 - Initial draft (PDF)

wadl2java

The latest distribution can be downloaded here.(Version 1.1.2, July 2012)

The distribution contains the following:

wadl-cmdline

A command line tool that generates client side stubs from WADL files, see the wadl2java documentation for full details.

wadl-ant

An Ant plug-in that generates client side stubs from WADL files, see the wadl2java documentation for full details.

wadl-client-plugin

A Maven plug-in that generates client side stubs from WADL files that work with the Jersey 1.x client, see the wadl2java documentation for full details.

wadl-dist

Sample projects that demostrate use of the wadl2java tools to create stubs for the Yahoo News Search Service.

Other Resources

wadl_documentation.xsl

Mark Nottingham has created a project to develop XSLT stylesheets to transform WADL documents into human-readable documentation.

wadl.xsl

Mark Sawers has published an alternative XSLT stylesheet to transform WADL documents into human-readable documentation.

wadl2java

The Apache CXF project has a tool also called wadl2java that generates for both the client and the service.

Contributing to the Project

Contributions are welcome in the following areas:

• Suggestions for improvements to the current tools. These can be in the form of:
  • Bug reports
  • Feature requests
  • Source code patches
• Suggestions for improvements to the WADL specification
• Submission of WADL files for existing Web applications
• Submission of new tools
• Documentation or tutorials on the use of WADL or the tools under development here.

Project Build Instructions

You need Maven 2 to build the code contained within this project. Java SE 6 or later is required. First check out the workspace:

$ svn checkout https://svn.java.net/svn/wadl~svn/trunk/wadl wadl --username yourid

where yourid is your java.net user id.

Go to the project root directory and build the project:

$ cd wadl
$ mvn package

The complete distribution will be built in:

wadl-dist/target/wadl-dist-1.1.3-SNAPSHOT-bin.zip

After unpacking the distribution, see the content of the samples directory for examples of how to use wadl2java from the command line, from Ant and from Maven.