From: Peter Hickman <peter@...>
Date: 2007-01-08T23:51:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Passing ruby literals over TPC as an alternative to Xml-Rpc

Dolazy wrote:
> Passing ruby literals seems an easy way to let programs communicate
> with each other.. And it eliminates the verbosity of XML.
>
> I'll give an example for those not familiar with literals or xml-rpc:
> Instead of sending:
> <array>
>   <data>
>     <value><i4>1404</i4></value>
>     <value><string>Something here</string></value>
>     <value><i4>1</i4></value>
>   </data>
> </array>
>
> you would be sending:
> [ 1404, "Something here", 1 ]
>
> Do you think it could be a valid alternative to Xml-Rpc?
>
> I would love to hear your insights :-)
>
> Kind regards,
> Francis
>
>
>
>   
But if you are using an XML-RPC library you will never see the XML. How
is this a problem?

What you are suggesting would work but then you could also use bencoding
(as used in torrent files), which has a smaller overhead than XML but is
quite flexible.

Sure passing stuff over sockets would work :) but why do you feel the
need to replace XML-RPC? There is a little more to XML-RPC than the XML
encoding, ok not much more but it is more than just stuffing things into
XML. The advantages of using XML-RPC is that it will allow other
programming languages to communicate with you without having to write
libraries for your new protocol for half a dozen languages.

Now SOAP, that's an abomination!