Re: Re: [ANN] XINS 1.3 supports XML-RPC

Paul,


> > Good. Feedback is highly appreciated! Did you find that the underlying concepts were explained enough?
> >
> Yes but my background does make a bias on it... for example, the gory
> details of instructions are a bit superfluous to me... a single XML file
> (which could become exploded) would have been fine.

At the moment, everything is split in multiple files. One per API
definition, one per function, one per type, one with all environments,
one per API implementation, etc. We currently have no plan to allow
combining everything in a single file. Once your project or API grows,
the monolithic XML file could easily  grow unmanagable.

Would you prefer that the Primer allows you to download all files and
skip over quite a few steps?

> I also found that the tutorial lead me to way too many files to be
> written but I presume I'll realize the amplitued

What do you mean?

> I was using the cvs checkout believing xml-rpc was not in 1.3 (which is
> wrong as I see)... had to correct a few XSL mistakes (xsl:var elements
> were duplicate in templates) and that I could have wrongly done for sure...

The -pre1 version I just uploaded this morning should work well. If
you do find XSLT errors, please let me know, because then we sure
didn't find them!

> > With XINS 1.3, you still have to pass ?_convention=_xins-xmlrpc to the URL.
> >
> I see... when is 1.4 expected ?

As stated in the FAQ:

"Development has started and the first alpha release is expected in
December 2005. The first beta release is planned for February 28, the
first release candidate for March 28 and the 1.4.0-final is planned
for April 18."

This planning may be adjusted if necessary.

> (I realize I was making the error, earlier, that n was empty... but the
> only error I got was a status 400 (which makes an IOException instead of
> a decent xml-rpc fault saying missing params).

I've submitted a bug report for this:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1371632&group_id=71598&atid=531814

> Two more questions:
> - how much do you support keep-alive connections ? We have been using
> XML-RPC library in settings where as much as 300-500 queries a second
> happen so keep-alive is an important factor.

XINS 1.3 does not support Keep-alive connections and there are
currently no plans to include this feature in XINS 1.4. However, with
enough interest, we may investigate feasability of including it in
XINS 1.4.

In the past, we have done some research on using Keep-alive, based on
these RFEs:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1088277&group_id=71598&atid=531817
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1088278&group_id=71598&atid=531817

Our conclusion was that support for Keep-alive requires significant
research, in order to make sure it can be configured properly and
behaves as expected and configured. On the other hand, the overhead of
creating a new HTTP connection is relatively small, especially on a
low-latency internal 100Mbit/1Gbit network.

These RFEs are now marked as 'pending' because they are not planned
for the next XINS release.

> - how can I start for the integration of XINS in our ActiveMath
> web-application, using Tomcat thus far. Is there a XINS-servlet ? How do

Yes, there is a XINS servlet. When you execute 'xins war-allinone'
(replace 'allinone' with the name of the API) you will get a WAR file,
including a generated web.xml file. If you look in the web.xml file
(for example 'build/webapps/allinone/web.xml') you will see something
like this in it:

<servlet>
<servlet-name>allinone</servlet-name>
<display-name>allinone</display-name>
<description>Implementation of 'allinone' API.</description>
<servlet-class>org.xins.server.APIServlet</servlet-class>

That's the XINS servlet. It is configured using the (generated)
init-params in the web.xml file, which are typically based on settings
in the impl.xml file.

Basically, just deploy the WAR file in Tomcat. We have tested
extensively with Tomcat, Jetty and Orion. And we use XINS in
production with Tomcat 4.1, on Java 1.4.1 and 1.4.2.

> I add new "objects" and attach them to URLs ? Which ant-tasks should I
> use for the generation of the stubs and friends? I

Have a look at the user guide, the section about 'Multiple
implementations'. You should first define an implementation for your
API in the xins-project.xml file (for example: <impl name="stub5"/>).

Assuming the name of the API is 'allinone':
- Execute 'xins-allinone-stub5' to get the stub source code generated.
Note that it will take the information from your examples, so no
examples means your stub is pretty empty.
- After that, try the stub out with the command 'xins
run-allinone-stub5'. That will use an internal servlet container.
- Alternatively, just deploy the thing in Tomcat or so. The WAR file
is under build/webapps/allinone-stub5

> thanks for XINS!

Glad you like it! Let us know what you like and what you would like to
see improved, so we can take your comments into account for
documentation improvements and/or for the upcoming XINS 1.4.0 release.

Regards,


Ernst


 
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