[Mailman-Developers] Remote scripting with XML-RPC

[Eric Kidd]

On Sat, Apr 07, 2001 at 11:26:53PM +0200, Ricardo Kustner wrote:
> What about using SOAP? I don't know that much about it but it looks like
> about the same thing XML-RPC does but I could be wrong though :)

You can find the two specifications here:

  http://www.xmlrpc.com/spec
  http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/

Basically, XML-RPC is a very early fork of SOAP, back before a whole bunch
of internal Microsoft committees each decided to add their favorite
feature to the specification. ;-)

Pros of SOAP:

  * It's going to be built into Microsoft .NET.
  * Lots of libraries provide support for various subsets of SOAP.  A few
    of these run under Unix.
  * SOAP is extensible, flexible, malleable, etc.
  * There's a very reasonable subset of SOAP evolving (BDG), but it's not
    clear that some of the big developers will be compatible with that
    subset.

Pros of XML-RPC:

  * All the clients and servers talk to each other already.
  * It's ridiculously simple.
  * Clients are available for all of the major scripting languages, and
    many of the minor ones.
  * I'm willing to implement it. :-)

Basically, XML-RPC is a Real Simple, Right Now<tm> kind of thing.  SOAP is
a little bit like OSI networking or SGML--a sweet idea in theory, but a wee
bit complex in practice.

But it's not an either-or choice.  All my XML-RPC work will be open source,
so once there's a good SOAP library for Python, it will be really easy to
add SOAP support.

Does this seem like a reasonable approach?

Cheers,
Eric