Hi, I've been researching WADL and am wondering why it isn't more widely adopted?
With the rate at which REST usage seems to be growing, I'm surprised that more development efforts don't use it.
Is there are fundamental flaw in its design, is it not a good match for the culture that typically surrounds RESTful web services, or is it something else entirely?
I think the main reason why WADL doesn't gain popularity is that it might bring back to live all those problem we had with SOAP and WSDL. To me, the interoperability aspect is the single most important aspect of web-services.
By following the RESTful way of using pure HTTP standards you get interoperability "for free". Once you need a document to describe the services, there will be different client frameworks (or different servers frameworks) that will interpret this document differently.
Once different frameworks auto-generate code from WADL you will have to deal with the interoperability problems again.
The lack of standards is the weakness and strength of the RESTful way, let's give the simple approach a chance. (even though we really enjoy automatic code generation :-) )