9.5. What's WSDL?

Pronounced "whiz-dill," WSDL stands for Web Services Description Language, an XML format for describing web services. The most useful bit of the Google Web API Developer's Kit is GoogleSearch.wsdl, a WSDL file describing the Google API's available services, method names, and expected arguments to your programming language of choice.

Most of the hacks in this book assume that the GoogleSearch.wsdl file is in the same directory as the scripts that you're writing since this is probably the simplest setup. If you prefer to keep it elsewhere, be sure to alter the path in the script at hand. A Perl hack usually specifies the location of the WSDL file, like so:

...

# Location of the GoogleSearch WSDL file.

my $google_wdsl = "./GoogleSearch.wsdl";

...

I like to keep such files together in a library directory and so would make the following adjustment to the previous code snippet:

...

# Location of the GoogleSearch WSDL file.

my $google_wdsl = "/home/me/lib/GoogleSearch.wsdl";

...