RESTful Web Service Descriptions

I've fleshed out some of the details I left dangling in my previous post about WITSML. The WITSML stuff is so specialized, I've created a separate blog for it.


But if you are interested in the web description language (web-http-desc) discussion there is some meat here for you as well. This draft documents RESTful access to WITSML services, and writing it was a great exercise for the description discussion. (I didn't write it as an exercise; our product implements some of that protocol right now; but I had never written it down in one place).

WITSML is "Well Information Transfer Standard" markup language. It defines not only document formats, but a SOAP API that has the following operations:

AddToStore
GetFromStore
UpdateInStore
DeleteFromStore

Look familiar? Well GetFromStore is a query, and has a query string parameter, but generally, you can do 90% of WITSML just by GET, PUT, and DELETE on objects, and the other 10% are vanilla things you could do with POST.

If you are interested in the web description language discussion, I invite you to have a look at the WITSML+REST draft and comment here or on the list.