SMODL is a simple XML-dialect for declaring method signatures and data structures. A major design goal of SMODL is to let non-technical domain experts to participate in a Web service development, allowing them to describe, develop and use Web services. SMODL describes Web services in a format close to a human language, while still being powerful enough to be used in real projects.

At first glance, SMODL seems to be similar to a Java or C# interface. However, SMODL is a modelling language and allows annotations which goes beyond what such interfaces can express. SMODL is also language-neutral, meaning that code for any language can be generated from it. You would use SMODL to model a Web service and then generate e.g. Java or C# to implement it.

SMODL is not WSDL! The primary goal of SMODL is to be understandable by humans, something rarely claimed for WSDL. However, if required, a SMODL model can be translated to WSDL to deploy the Web service on standard and non-proprietary platforms.

Initially, SMODL was developed by RUnit Software for internal use in 2004 in response to the lack of simple tools for working with Web services. The original motivation for SMODL was

As work continued through 2005 – 2009, SMODL also turned out to be a simple tool for trained programmers to quickly prototype and develop Web services.