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

Re: XML-RPC vs. Corba

Author:Ken MacLeod
Posted:2/10/1999; 10:19:53 AM
Topic:XML-RPC Spec Update
Msg #:2807 (In response to 2801)
Prev/Next:2806 / 2808

>> With the current design, there's usually no need to add explicit type information to the server and client ends; you can simply rely on Python's strong dynamic typing system to do the right thing. No need to add custom proxies or type conversion layers; the standard interface just works right out of the box!

>> But if you drop the type info from the wire protocol, you suddenly have to add type maps to the server and client ends to get things working.

Note that is a corollary to the language design. Languages that don't reuse the same operators to perform different functions (like using `+' to mean addition for numbers and concatenation for strings) can handle the type conversion with no problem.

Unfortunately, when it comes to language-neutral protocol design you have to cater to the fact that four out of five languages can't handle the coercion automatically. :-(




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