Phil Tomson asked >What is WSDL and what does it do for us? There are many views on that. WSDL makes it easy for toolsets to generate the appropriate code to invoke SOAP / Web Services. The "dream" is that an organization will publish the availability of it's web services in a directory (UDDI) and from the WSDL (read IDL) you will be able to "automagically" work out how to invoke the service. Dyanamic languages like Ruby don't really need WSDL, but it is great for the tool vendors. WSDL is a real pain to create manually. Simon Fell says [http://www.pocketsoap.com/weblog/stories/2002/01/13/whatsWsdl.html] "If you ignore all the politics and WSDL will save the earth hype, and concentrate on what people are doing with WSDL, then things become clearer, WSDL is simply a SOAP server description language, it describes everything you need to know in order to make a sucessfull call to a SOAP endpoint. The information includes methodNames, namespace URI's, encoding styles, soap endpoint URL(s), parameters and data types. If you are a COM or CORBA programmer then you should recognise WSDL as being the IDL of SOAP. " The following sites should give you a feel for the debate http://www.byte.com/documents/s=7031/byt1015007393289/0304_udell.html http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2001/03/03 http://www.xmlrpc.com/discuss/msgReader$555 http://radio.weblogs.com/0101679/2002/01/24.html#a23 http://www.redmonk.net/917 http://radio.weblogs.com/0101679/2002/03/05.html http://radio.weblogs.com/0101679/stories/2002/02/15/aBusyDevelopersGuideTo Wsdl11.html http://wsdl.soapware.org/ Pete ---- Pete McBreen, McBreen.Consulting , Cochrane, AB email: petemcbreen / acm.org http://www.mcbreen.ab.ca/ Author, "Software Craftsmanship The New Imperative" Addison-Wesley (C) 2002 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201733862 Finalist for the 2002 Jolt Awards