Member Submission - Note

Date: Mar. 15, 2001
Link: http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl
Source Author or Organization: Microsoft Corporation, IBM Research

The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) grammar describes Web services, including: interface and end points (or ports), what a service can do, where it resides and how to invoke it via machine-understandable terms targeted for automated distributed communications between Web applications.

WDSL can extend Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and this Note describes and includes bindings for using WSDL in combination with SOAP, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) for remote process invocation. WDSL is itself extensible, with a common binding mechanism that may be used to produce binding extensions for other protocols.