RE: New release of phpxmlrpc and EXTRAS package

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] 
> [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf
> Of Ernst de Haan
> Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2006 9:09 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Cc: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [xml-rpc] New release of phpxmlrpc and EXTRAS package
> 
> ...
> 
> I look at the on-line demonstration at:
> 
> and it seems the feature is indeed quite powerful. Some suggestions:
> - In the test form, descriptions for the parameters would be nice
> - In the test form, ask for the individual values instead of asking
> the user to manually write an XML-RPC request. This helps the user a
> lot, I believe.
>

The test-form was added as an after-tought, and as such still has many rough edges.
But there are some problems I have with asking directly the users values for individual parameters. The same problems also apply to the web-based xmlrpc debugger that is shipped with the library and which you can find online at http://gggeek.damacom.it/debugger/:
+ parameters with recursive types (array, struct) cannot be entered 'directly' by the user.
Since the xmlrpc introspection methods only describe top-level parameters, the form would need to have a massive amount of js code that allows the user to build trees of values. And those trees of values would not be validated anyway, leaving the user as many chances to shoot himself in the foot as when using plain xml
+ how to let the user enter datetime and base64-encoded values? for datetime I can imagine a js calendar picker, which will format the chosen date in the appropriate format, but base64 would work best with a file-upload box, which is not always the best idea (esp. on public servers), or need at least a js based encoding...

All in all I am not a great js coder, and, even though a javascript-based xmlrpc builder is a great idea, I am not sure I can afford the time to code it.

> ...
> 
> Have you considered supporting POX-RPC (previously called "REST-RPC")
> as well? That's the protocol XINS uses. It's extremely simple, with
> HTTP parameters as input and a simple XML document as output.
> 

I did a brief search on XINS.sf.net and goog, but found no document that describes the POX-RPC protocol.
Is it as easy as 'any xml is ok'? That would be completely unpractical to glue onto phpxmlrpc.
I was in fact able to add the json-rpc extension because the json format is extremely similar to xmlrpc: a couple of base types (string, int, boolean), plus an array type and a struct/object type. Those are the basic types that phpxmlrpc is built upon, and it would be very hard to add support for something which is either typeless or allows for definition of new types on the fly (such as soap). There is also the rpc calling convention to take into account: one methodcall in, one methodresponse or error out.

Bye
Gaetano


 
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