XmlRpc

RPC using XML.

A protocol initiated by Dave Winer.

http://www.xmlrpc.com/

http://effbot.org/zone/xmlrpc-errata.htm

Edd Dumbill article from 1999

A simpler version of SOAP.

Facing a new competitor called ReST

Some people are looking at XmlRpc for wikis:

• <http://www.ecyrd.com/J S P Wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=WikiRPCInterface>

• http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/XmlRpcToWiki

• VoodooPad: http://flyingmeat.com/vpwiki.html

http://inessential.com/?comments=1&postid=2991

MeerKat interface http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/rss/2000/11/14/meerkat_xmlrpc.html

Some Zope/XmlRpc links

• http://www.zope.org/Members/Amos/XML-RPC

• http://www.zope.org/Members/teyc/howxmlrpc

• http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-June/093954.html

• Amos Latteier 2000 http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2000/01/xmlrpc/index.html |article

Need to integrate with a business partners, have settled on XML over HTTP. So going to go with XmlRpc for now, largely because it will probably offer more specific examples I can copy from to avoid newbie errors!

Example of returning a "table" of results

I think of an 'array' as a single-column list of values. A 'struct' as a flat table (each 'member' being a row); actually, more like single record, which each 'member' being a name-value pair (field-name and its value). So if I'm passing multiple flat records, that would be an array of structs?

So if I want to send a couple different types of records, with multiple instances of 1 of those types, I might have...

• an array to represent passing multiple object types

  • a value for each type

    • a single struct for the single record of one type

    • an array of structs for multiple records of a single type

Seeking feedback.

Doh, don't try to figure out the spec, just use the library code! For my case above, I (in Python):

• started out with a tuple of dictionaries

• each dictionary's key was the record/object type

• if only a single instance of a type was allowed to be passed, then that dictionary value would be a dictionary

• if multiple instances of a certain type might be passed together, then the value of that dictionary would be a tuple of dictionaries

Ironic outcome - partner decided not to do very much interop, and for the one use-case that we did do it, I had to mimic an embedded system and send hex over UDP!