The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is an XML format published for describing Web service. Version V 1.1 has not been endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), however it has released a draft for version 2.0 on May 11 2005, that will be a recommendation (an official standard), and thus endorsed by the W3C.

It is commonly abbreviated as WSDL in technical literature and often pronounced Whiz -Dull .

WSDL describes the public interface to the web service. This is an XML-based service description on how to communicate using the web service; namely the protocol bindings and message formats required to interact with the web services listed in its directory. The supported operations and messages are described abstractly, and then bound to a concrete network protocol and message format.

WSDL is often used in combination with SOAP and XML Schema to provide web services over the internet. A client (program) connecting to a web service can read the WSDL to determine what functions are available on the server. Any special datatypes used are embedded in the WSDL file in the form of XML Schema. The client can then use SOAP to actually call one of the functions listed in the WSDL.

==See also== *Web Service *Simple Object Access Protocol *Web Services Invocation Framework *UDDI *WS-I Basic Profile *List of Web service markup languages *Comparison of Web service markup languages

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