Web functions idea

[Mark Carter]

I was musing recently about how one could, for example, set up a really 
simple mailing subscription list. It occurred to me that a really simple 
way to implement it would be to use xmlrpc.
So there could be a function
subscribe(emailAddress),
which would send an email for confirmation, and another function
confirm(emailAddress, password)
which would confirm the address ... and so on.

Now, the problem is that, if you use xmlrpc, it requires some kind of 
fiddly software that the client would have to install. What you would 
really want is some kind of web interface instead of xmlrpc - a kind of 
"web driven xmlrpc" (that would eliminate the need of an actual xmlrpc 
server).

The point of it being this: a developer would just write the functions 
that he needed, a la xmlrpc, which would be "exposed" to this new module 
(let's call it webrpc) - and webrpc would examine the function, work out 
how many arguments it had, and display a form for the user to fill out. 
 From an application writer's point-of-view, it abstracts away the whole 
web process, leaving him free to just concentrate on the underlying 
function implementation.