Programming Web Services with XML-RPC

Chapter 3. Client-Server Communication: XML-RPC in Java

Java was built from the ground up as a network-centric development environment. As a Java developer, XML-RPC offers you an opportunity to extend that foundation in a structured way. Adding XML-RPC to your toolkit makes it easier to integrate a Java application with an application built using another environment or simply to establish lightweight point-to-point communication between Java programs running on different computers. Although XML-RPC goes against the grain of much Java network programming (and even against some of the fundamental principles of object-oriented development), its alternative approach can be useful in many relatively common scenarios.

You already have a wide variety of Java-based XML and HTTP tools to choose from, but you can also take advantage of a prepackaged set of XML-RPC tools. Although understanding the foundations of XML-RPC is very useful for debugging and for establishing connections between systems in different environments, you can treat XML-RPC much like you do any other Java feature. There’s some setup work to do, especially for XML-RPC servers, but most of this work is simple and needs to be done only once in the course of a program.

This chapter looks at how XML-RPC fits into Java’s many network options. It demonstrates how to build a variety of different XML-RPC clients, servers, and handlers. Some of these examples take advantage of built-in functionality for setting up simple XML-RPC ...