What is the point in a WSDL with a rest based service?

Question

If REST based web services are as simple as GETing and POSTing to a url and parsing the response wht exactly do we need a wsdl? Whats the point. I understand that when using SOAP based services it is used to construct the SOAP requests and responses but dont really see why visual studio provides me with a wsdl when I create a REST based service...

Answer 1

WSDL is designed to allow clients to discover service capabilities, primarily at design time. REST has the hypermedia constraint that requires that all service capabilities should be discoverable at runtime via the linked representations that they return.

Proper REST services are naturally discoverable therefore there is no need for a WSDL specification in addition.