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

Summary of recent XML-RPC developments

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:9/7/1999; 6:49:47 AM
Topic:Summary of recent XML-RPC developments
Msg #:10661
Prev/Next:10660 / 10662

There were many new developments in XML-RPC over the long holiday weekend, and I expect there will be many more over the coming weeks. The purpose of this posting is to summarize what has been accomplished and speculate on what the immediate future holds.

Most of what's happened is in relation to a high-level spec that says what a discussion group interface looks like. This builds on a lower-level spec, that explains what the formatting of an XML-RPC message is and what a returned message looks like. None of this will make sense, at a technical plumbing level, until you understand the two specs.

But you don't have to start from scratch. There are already server-side implementations you can use, for Java, Python, Perl, Tcl, ASP, PHP, and Zope. They are linked to from the XML-RPC.COM home page.

Why??

The advantage of wiring up a discussion server is that thru common interfaces, people are able to connect up scriptable text editors to the web, working around the limited abilities of