visual WADL editor

Question

WADL seams to be the better (light-weight) way to annotate REST Services.

My question: Do you know a visual Tool (Online, Eclipse Plugin or other) to create and manage the WADL Specification?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I am surprised the answer above was accepted, they are only links for tools validating the WADL, not creating it. Altova's XMLSpy indeed has nice visual WSDL editor but there is no option for WADL. You can only edit it there as normal XML but then you only get normal XML editor.

The closest thing to visual WADL editor I found is this plugin to Eclipse:

http://www.myeclipseide.com/module-htmlpages-display-pid-10.html

You can see on the pictures below you have a visual editor for defining the service and it then generates Jersey REST service ... from where you can get WADL.

Answer 2

I find SOAPUI excellent for editing WADL definitions and creating API contracts (and can do the same for WSDL).

While it is not visual in the same way xmlspy is; its structured approach is much better for establish a WebService 'contract'. It can then optionally be used to create Test Cases and Service Mocks.

Answer 3

For online I have used this to validate WADLs with good results. http://www.utilities-online.info/xsdvalidation/

You can obtain the XSD for the WADL from W3C site here: http://www.w3.org/Submission/wadl/wadl.xsd

The online tool is very straight forward to use. Your WADL goes in the left-hand pane and the XSD in the other one. It takes a while to validate so you might have to coax your browser a bit ...

I have also used oXygen against the same XSD and would recommend it over the online tool. It checks as you type so if you're authoring a lot of WADLs then it's really worth it the license. http://www.oxygenxml.com/

The other visual tool is XML Spy from Altova. I haven't used this for a while but they have a good range of products and worth considering if you can use other tools from their package, e.g. diffdog is supposed to be very good. http://www.altova.com/xmlspy.html

Finally the Netbeans IDE has support, but it seems a bit overkill to run an IDE in order to author a WADL. This is not lightweight :-)