Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

What is XML-RPC? How to get started?

Author:Philippe Martin
Posted:1/24/1999; 4:00:11 PM
Topic:Writing for Searching
Msg #:2431 (In response to 2237)
Prev/Next:2430 / 2432

This was posted in response to a question on a Frontier list.

QUESTION:

What is XML-RPC?

RPC stands for Remote Procedure Calls. Procedures are events which occur inside your computer in response to your actions. A procedure call, to summarize, is the name of a procedure, its parameters, and the result it returns. So for example when you ask Frontier to run a script and you get its result, you use a procedure call.

Now, if Frontier is running on another machine that you access thru the Internet (i.e. a remote machine), you'd use a Remote Procedure Call. It's almost the same, except for two points:

  1. the call has to be transmitted across the Internet
  2. the procedure may run on a platform different than the one you're using

So the remote procedure calls must be encoded in a cross platform compatible way. Among the numerous formats allowing this, Userland chose XML.

XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. Its main advantage is that it can be read and understood by computers running on any platform, but also by humans.

For more details, see:

QUESTION:

How to get started with XML-RPC?

Since XML is used to encode the data and to decode it at the other end of the connection, you may see it simply as a transfer format. In fact, you don't even have to care about it, because Frontier will do it for you transparently. So if you have two versions of Frontier, one running as a server on the Internet and the other one at your home, you can very easily transfer objects between them.

To learn how to do it, see:

QUESTION:

How to go further?

Searching for XML-RPC on the UserLand sites would return you a large number of pages. Here is a selection of the most useful ones:

Also, there was a lot of discussions about XML-RPC on the Script Meridian Community list. Thanks to Jim Roepcke, these discussions are archived and may be browsed on the Web. Start from this page..

And finally, if you need a RPC Debugger, UserLand made one:





This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:47:33 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.