When to use wsdl vs regular old scraping ?

[jay vas]

Hi guys : I guess I'm kind of old school. When I need data from a web source, I write code to parse it. If its XML, I use an XML library.

When and why are REST and WSDL needed ?

I just saw a .wsdl description for a sight which I manually parse data from, and I'm wondering if I can use it to clean up my code ?

[Ivan Krizsan]

Hi!
The key answer to your question is tooling, I believe.
There are tools that can generate proxy classes etc from WSDL and WADL (?) documents.
This saves considerable time and greatly reduce the risk for buggy code.
Personally, I would never consider writing that kind of code by hand, except for perhaps as a learning exercise.
Best wishes!