RFC: REST-RPC

REQUEST FOR COMMENTS

We are looking for comments on REST-RPC, a simple yet flexible
protocol for system-to-system communication, in the spirit of XML-RPC.

When XML-RPC came, it was a straight-forward protocol. It was based on
the ubiquitous XML and HTTP technologies. Although it had some obvious
shortcomings, such as lack of Unicode-support, the protocol is simple
and powerful.

XML-RPC was considered not to be powerful enough, so Microsoft and
others came up with SOAP, which is way more advanced (and complicated)
than XML-RPC. In order to apply SOAP effectively, one should also
understand and apply quite a few technologies, such as XML Namespaces,
UDDI, WSDL, XML Schema, Basic Profile, etc. And that's just the basis.
The stack of Web Services technologies is still growing.

In typical system-to-system communication scenarios, the complexity of
SOAP is plain overkill and simple interfaces are preferred. The
popularity of simple APIs such as the eBay REST API, Yahoo Flickr and
Amazon Alexa underline this, as well as the lively discussions on
REST.

REST-RPC aims to strengthen the case for simple RPC applications by
providing an extremely protocol based on the ubiquitous HTTP, XML and
Unicode technologies. It continues where XML-RPC left off, fixing all
of the identified XML-RPC issues and offering more flexibility by
supporting HTTP GET and POST. So browsers can call such services
directly.

This protocol is currently part of XINS, a framework for RPC
applications, but we are in the process of making it a technology in
its own right. We have been using and improving the protocol in
various applications since 2002 and find it is very easy to explain
and implement. Compared to SOAP the learning curve is almost a flat
line.

An F.A.Q. page has been set up which aims to explain what REST-RPC is
about, step by step: http://xins.sourceforge.net/restrpc.html

If you want to see the protocol in action, either run the XINS Primer tutorial:
http://xins.sourceforge.net/primer.html

or test drive a public API, using your browser:
http://xins.sourceforge.net/faq.html#public-apis

Comments from the XML-RPC community are highly appreciated!

XINS Homepage:
http://xins.sourceforge.net/

Wikipedia page on XINS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XINS

Kind regards,


Ernst de Haan


 
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