Sharing XMLRPC w/ my neighbors

[Doug Stanfield]

There was a recent discussion on the list on porting Python to the AS400
platform.  It led me to hope someone could give me a general direction
towards solving a dilemma.

I have a number of Linux systems doing network monitoring and management
types of things.  In an attempt to consolidate information and control I've
been having great luck using the XML-RPC library and setting up some
standard interfaces.  Its gotten to the point where this might be called a
Really Useful System.

There exists this group of folks who work in ways completely foreign to me.
They're known as the IS department and stoke an AS400 with something called
RPG-II to do billing <wink>.  It would be very useful if they could use one
of my interfaces, but I don't know how to tell them what to do.  They want
to hear something on the order of "Open a socket..." and I jumped at using
the xmlrpclib precisely to hide those mungy details.

The server in question is running a subclassed handler for the
xmlrpcserver.py written by Fredrik Lundh.  There are two methods of
interest, both of which take a string as a parameter.  They both return a
dictionary with a variable number of key-value pairs.  The flexibility this
provides is important for the scalability of my systems.

I'm just not sure of all the issues to address when trying to get the AS400
programmer's to use my system.  I don't want them to have to overcome any
hurdles to get something to work because its a breakthrough just to have
them considering this in the first place.  Specifically, if it makes more
sense to provide them a different scheme of connecting to my data I need to
know that up front.  I am willing to do that knowing that Python will allow
me to do it more quickly than they may be able to get their arms around
XML-RPC.  That despite my lack of experience in this area.

Any responses would be appreciated.

Doug Stanfield              Oceanic Cable