To address this shortcoming, the Web Application Description
Language (WADL [18]) was recently proposed. Also the
latest WSDL version 2.0 could be applied to describe RESTful Web
services, thanks to its more fine-grained control over the HTTP
binding and the possibility of supporting non-SOAP message encodings.
In general, having an interface description language to specify
service contracts is not only beneficial for simplifying repetitive
development tasks, but also helps to catch incompatibilities caused
by changes of service interfaces early in the development process.
Thanks to the strong typing features of WSDL, clients will break at
compile time. This would also benefit RESTful Web services, insofar
changes to the URI naming scheme11 and resource representations
are concerned, since due to the uniform interface principle
the actual set of operations applicable to a resource never changes
(as already discussed).