Monday, February 13, 2006

WSDL and Eclipse 3.1

I am doing some work on modular WSDL. I was looking for a good WSDL editor that was low cost as in free. Don't know how much hand coding you have tried with WSDL but it can become a bit tricky especially when trying to troubleshoot. It comes in handy to have a tool that shows you where some of your links may be off.

Altova is okay for syntax checking but to see graphical WSDL, you have to purchase a licensed copy. I had been playing around with Eclipse 3.1 and their web tools for a while doing some interoperability testing. I did not realize at the time that they had a built-in XML schema editor as well as a WSDL editor. Turns out it is not really bad for the price. They have just released version 1.0 of the web tools.

Here are a couple of screen shots to illustrate what I mean by graphical layout. In figure 1 you can see the correct linkage being made. This saves a lot of time.

Figure 1.


Figure 2 shows the import schema linked into the messages section. This is also nice in that it lets verify that your linkages are correct.

Figure 2.


Here is a site with some more good tips on using XML schemas and WSDL. I also found another site that where the authors are using modular WSDL in their design. It's a good reference if you are just getting started.

1 comment:

Conneva said...

Mark,

This is a great find! I've been using the WSDL editor in XML Spy Enterprise, but it's pricey and is not very intuitive.

I've also thought about just using the "Grid View" of XML Spy professional to create an XML document that adheres to the WSDL schema as a poor man's WSDL editor.

I've downloaded the Eclipse 3.1 Web Tools and will give it a go.

Thanks for the tip!

Mark C