logo

New Response

« Return to the main article

You are replying to:

    • avatar
    • Brandon
    • Posted on Thu 5 Jun 2003

    XML-RPC was originally developed by Microsoft, Developmentor and Userland and essentially provided a simple and effective way to implement distributed RPCs utilising XML. However its developers realised that it suffered from a number of flaws in areas such as extensibility, robustness and interoperability when pushed on a global scale. Having then worked on the draft specifications of SOAP, they then teamed up with IBM and pushed the final SOAP specifications before handing them over to the W3C.

    Some of the flaws inherent in XML-RPC are as follows:

    Inability to transparently extend the request/response formats. So for example if you needed to pass security credentials with your XML-RPC call you would have to modify the procedure and add one parameter.

    XML-RPC is bound to the HTTP protocol, whilst SOAP allows the use of HTTP, SMTP, JMS etc.

    XML-RPC doesn't use XML namespaces and defines its own data types and is therefore redundant given use of XML schemas.

    Although XML-RPC is XML based it provides no clean mechanism to pass an XML document within a request/response. You therefore have to revert to base64 encoding techniques etc. should this be required.

Your Comments

Name:
E-mail:
(optional)
Website:
(optional)
Comment: