Personally I think WSDL is an eldritch abomination that I utterly loath - for the sake of "generating a client" you can end up with a opaque mess that can be very difficult to diagnose problems with - particularly when different technology platforms are used on the client and server.
I never thought I'd say this, but I actually had fewer problems with CORBA and ONC RPC based systems than SOAP/WSDL based web services. Probably because they were so limiting that the interfaces tended to be quite straightforward - rather than the baroque approach often favoured by "enterprise" web services.
I will happily sacrifice a bit of development time for something that is much easier to troubleshoot - give me RESTful web services any day.
Oh, no doubt that there were terribly done WSDL mechanisms out there. Probably most of them. However, many of the mature choices now have a fairly reliable "generate a client off of this wsdl" to get a generic api you can hit from your language of choice. I recall using python and such was actually mostly as expected.
Compared with most "RESTful" services, which require me personally figuring out everything and home growing every portion. Heaven help you if someone makes a change breaking something you had already done.
If you want strongly-typed RPC integration with generated clients then something like Thrift, protobuf or Avro are vastly superior. Very simple and lightweight.
Not so much that Corba/IDL were intrinsically more limited than SOAP/WSDl - more that they were less tightly integrated with development environment and platforms so generally, in my experience, seemed to be used with a bit more care.
I never thought I'd say this, but I actually had fewer problems with CORBA and ONC RPC based systems than SOAP/WSDL based web services. Probably because they were so limiting that the interfaces tended to be quite straightforward - rather than the baroque approach often favoured by "enterprise" web services.
I will happily sacrifice a bit of development time for something that is much easier to troubleshoot - give me RESTful web services any day.