Programming Jabber

Looking at JabberRPCRequester Step by Step

After importing the libraries that we will need:

import jabber
import xmlrpclib
import string
import sys

we specify a number of parameters:

Server   = 'qmacro.dyndns.org'
Username = 'client'
Password = 'pass'
Resource = 'jrpc-client'

Endpoint = '[e-mail]/jrpc-server';
Method   = 'examples.getCountyName';

The script connects to the Jabber server defined in Server, with the username defined in Username. The resource that will be passed in the authentication request is jrpc-client. There is as much significance in this name as there is in the name of the resource used by JabberRPCResponder (jrpc-server): none. It’s just a useful naming convention to adopt when writing requesters and responders.

A single parameter, which will be interpreted as the index of the county to retrieve via the call to examples.getCountyName, is expected.

county = string.atoi(sys.argv[1])

The method expects an integer, so we convert it directly. This has a favorable secondary effect when we come to XML-RPC encode the request; if we hadn’t called the string.atoi() function and left county as a string, this is what the XML-RPC-encoded parcel would have looked like:

<methodCall>
  <methodName>examples.getCountyName</methodName>
  <params>
    <param>
      <value><string>1</string></value>
    </param>
  </params>
</methodCall>

However, this is what we really want:

<methodCall> <methodName>examples.getCountyName</methodName> <params> <param> <value><int>1</int></value> </param> ...