Comment 11 for bug 650967

"WADL schema is just too flexible and ambiguous for any tool to traverse and generate the code/assembly."

Exactly. WADL is explicitly not designed as a substrate for generated code. It's a guide to the documents served by the web service, describing how they link to each other and how you can use them to formulate your HTTP requests. I think we've talked about this before, but it bears repeating.

I suspect you want something like WSDL: a document that uses a standardized type system to describe a distributed object model which you can map onto client-side classes in a statically compiled language.

The main anti-WADL argument is that WADL is just a friendlier version of WSDL, a way of writing programmatic "API" clients instead of web-browser-like clients that just process documents. The trend, insofar as there is a trend, is away from documents that describe anything resembling client-side data structures, and towards documents that describe *themselves*, the way HTML documents do. (At this point, the main alternative to WADL is HTML5.)

You're understandably concerned about putting Launchpad-specific code in your WADL tool. I would say that by introducing any notion of "collection" into your tool, you've already introduced Launchpad-specific code. WADL doesn't define "collection", so of course it doesn't define "type of the collection". We respect this distinction by keeping collection-aware code in lazr.restfulclient, not in wadllib.

Now, using our WADL as though it were WSDL should be possible, because the documents we send _do_ correspond pretty closely to classical data structures. We *do* serve collections, and each collection *does* have a homogenous "type". And I've done what I can to express these facts using WADL's vocabulary.

WADL makes it easy to point out the interesting parts of a document, and so I'm able to say: "if you look *here* in the bug-page document, you'll find a bunch of links to bug documents". That's my way of saying "a bug-page is a collection of bugs". I can't say that that's what bug-page "is", because as far as WADL is concerned, a bug-page is just a JSON document that contains certain links.

There's some more I could do to distinguish the various links from each other--that's the rel/rev stuff I've talked about earlier in this bug. But if you want a "collection" that has a homogenous "type", you'll either need to hard-code those ideas into your code, or become comfortable with relating documents to each other through their rel and rev attributes.