How do I discover RESTful Web services?

When I want to find a "Big" Web service (WS-*/WSDL based) of required functionality I can simply google for ".... filetype:wsdl" because Google indexes also WSDL definitions. Or I can simply use some registries that already crawled the Web for WSDL definitions for me, e.g. SeekDa.com or ServiceFinder.

When I want to find RESTful Web service (RESTful Web API) I may count only on the community, because it is not possible to distinguish between URI of RESTful Web service and other Web resources (e.g. Web sites URLs) and hence any focused crawler cannot tell for 100% sure: this is URI of RESTful Web service. So, I come e.g. to the ProgrammableWeb.com and I hope someone already used/found the service I'm looking for and registered it there.

Recently, I was looking for the Web service for abbreviation expansion. I couldn't find it in portals like ProgrammableWeb, because no-one has put it there. Finally I was forced to browse through several abbreviation dictionaries sites, dig and drill there and I finally found Abbreviations.com Web service API in RESTful form. That took me a lot of time!

Is there any other Way to discover RESTful Web services on the Web?

Thank you. That's a good idea assuming RESTful Web services are described with WADLs. But currently it's just idea, not commonly practices. So coming back to the real world: How can I find interesting RESTful Web service NOW?

dzieciou 2009-11-24 12:55:55

unless you know them, you can't. That's what WADL tries to solve.

Stefano Borini 2009-11-24 13:05:50

OK. BTW, do you know any research on extracting WADL definitions from the document of the API, associated Web pages? Any trials? That would be nice way generate WADL-s semi-automatically and provide some smooth transition (evolution instead of revolution) from the current lack of interfaces for RESTful Web services.

dzieciou 2009-11-24 13:54:10

Thank you. I haven't considered MIME types of the service response :-)

dzieciou 2009-11-24 13:08:38

Just a comment: you're never sure whether application/xml has been generated on call (as a service response) or its a static XML document. So this is just one of the possible indicators. Any other suggestions?

dzieciou 2009-11-24 13:25:12

You don't need to know that. Provded it satisifies the URI you can't demand how it should be served. Some answers could be precalculated and cached.

djna 2009-11-24 13:29:22

I may need to know that to try to extract functionality from the associated Web sites to automatically generate WADL definition or at least try to do it. I don't want to waste my time on resources that are not Web service API. For instance, the following appears to be some static data: http://data.eastmoney.com/flash2/data2_1100.xml?r= (with application/xml MIME type). Though it may be also generated on call. I see no explicit feature of the HTTP response to say it comes from the Web service (even pre-calculated and cache) or it's a static document.

dzieciou 2009-11-24 13:49:06

My point is that this *is* a restful service! In the sense that you have a confirming URI and some conforming result. If the service implementation is some JAVA running or we suck from disk the "interface" is indistinguishable. It walks and quacks like a REST service, for your purposes it *is* a service. If some aspect of the response doesn't conform to the shape of a service *then* it ain't a service - even if some Java *did* produce it. You can only look at URI and response, that's it. You cannot tell difference between static and dynamic. Consider "http://universe/ended" -> {"no"}

djna 2009-11-24 14:45:32

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How do I discover RESTful Web services?

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