Quo vadis interface definition languages? Towards a interface definition language for RESTful services

Current web-service description languages like WSDL are very powerful and many topics, like how to describe the composition of web-services, have received much attention by the scientific community. With the rise of RESTful webservices, resources come to the focus of service developers, with the need to transfer many well understood problems to a new paradigm. RESTful services up to now are most commonly described in a natural language, and there is no good interface description language, as WSDL (2.0) is clumsy to use and WADL lacks features and widespread use. In this paper we want to analyze common interface description languages, their properties and shortcomings and we introduce RIDDL, a flexible and extensible service description language to cover description and composition.