From: Alex Young <alex@...>
Date: 2007-04-04T17:24:41+09:00
Subject: Re: XMLRPC  Ruby 1.8.6 stdlib Authentication/docs

John Miller wrote:
> Alex Young wrote:
>> John Miller wrote:
>>> There seems to be a lot of hidden functionality that is not documented.
>> Has your reading included http://www.ntecs.de/projects/xmlrpc4r/ ?  If
>> so, please share your thoughts.  I can't remember if it's signposted
>> from the sources or not.
> 
> Yes I have.  It appears that it is almost identical to the documentation 
> in the RDOC.  However, as I mentioned above, I am trying to create a 
> system for debugging my Rails app, and I would therefore like a little 
> more control then the default client gives.  In file like create.rb, 
> parse.rb, and utils.rb, nothing significant is documented.  I have 
> worked out most of what it does and written it into my copy of the code. 
> My offer is to share this as a start for documenting the rest of this 
> library if that would be a useful thing.
Personally, I think it would.  More (good) documentation is always a 
good thing.

> I mentioned the issue with cookies before, but as it stands it would at 
> least be nice to know that this mechanism does not provide the standard 
> client behavior with cookies.
While I've done a fair amount of work with the XMLRPC library, I've not 
actually had to use the cookie functionality yet.  I'm sure this would 
have bitten me in the future if you hadn't brought it up.

> While one is able to set different parsers and writers, it is not clear 
> either what the differences between them are, nor how one might go about 
> roiling ones own.  This is ultimately what I have done so that I can 
> watch what the client and server are actually saying to each other.  
I've been intrigued by this in the past, but I haven't had the time (or 
enough of a reason) to investigate.  Specifically I was wondering if 
there might be any performance differences between the included parsers, 
and whether it would be worthwhile implementing a libxml-based one.

> Again, I understand that this is a bit of a back-woods library, and I am 
> not demanding that anyone write this documentation instead of writing 
> code.  It is only that I have spent enough time with this library that I 
> might be able to make a start at it, and wonder if it would be 
> appreciated if I did.
Certainly by me.  It would probably be worth posting documentation 
patches to ruby-core to see what the maintainers think.

-- 
Alex