Programming Web Services with XML-RPC

Foreword

My name is Dave Winer. I wear a lot of hats. I’m the CEO of a company, a programmer, a columnist, a weblogger, and a developer of things that turn into standards. The last role was the biggest surprise. I’ve been developing software since the late 1970s, and all the time I wanted most to create a standard—to develop something that’s so compelling and simple that its goodness propels it to success. I’d say now, with XML-RPC becoming such a widely adopted protocol, that it’s happened. It’s a strange feeling, for sure. Now, three years after the publication of the initial spec, it’s an interesting time to pause and reflect how we got here, and then I’d like to offer some ideas for where we’re going.

In 1998, my company, UserLand Software, had just finished porting Frontier from Macintosh to Windows. Our software made extensive use of networking, so we had a problem—with two versions of the software, how would they communicate? We could no longer use the networking software of one platform: Apple Events on the Mac or DCOM on Windows. So we decided to use two standards of the Internet, XML and HTTP, to form the communication protocol for our software. By February 1998, we had a deployed protocol for Frontier-to-Frontier communication simply called RPC, and it worked pretty well.

As I often do, I wrote a public essay about this and offered to work with others. Usually, I make those offers and no one responds. This time, I got a call from Bob Atkinson, who I knew from work we did ...