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

Re: Chuck's XML-RPC Comments

Author:Chuck Shotton
Posted:1/24/1999; 5:13:44 PM
Topic:Chuck's XML-RPC Comments
Msg #:2432 (In response to 2410)
Prev/Next:2431 / 2433

Skip writes: * Discovery of URI and MIME type. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the client to know what URI to call for any given application server(s) it might be talking to. Similarly, XML should be the only MIME type supported (both for requests and responses). Allowing MIME types other than XML for the request and response will only make it difficult to write servers and clients. Lots of XML tools are coming online, so support shouldn't be a big issue.

Chuck responds: I don't think the rationale for this is being communicated clearly. Some servers dispatch CGIs or plug-ins based strictly on the MIME type. As you said yourself, text/xml is too broad (at least for some servers.) Being able to discover the URI for the XML RPC services on a given HTTP host as well as discover the appropriate MIME type allows a diverse range of servers to use their own calling conventions to support the same RPC service. As a developer I have absolutely no desire to write 20 different RPC wrappers to talk to 20 different HTTP servers, all of which are implementing the same RPC but at different URLs and/or expecting different MIME types.

If you want the RPC mechanism to piggy-back on any HTTP server, it had better be able to accomodate the wide variety of invocation mechanisms these servers implement for external code. And if you want to write your client side code only once, you're going to need a mechanism to easily discover how to talk to all these different servers. Even though the method name and parameters may be identical, the URL and MIME types may not be. That alone argues for the need for clients to be able to do discovery.

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