Programming Web Services with XML-RPC

Preface

XML-RPC takes web technology in a new direction, giving you a new way to create simple, but powerful, connections between different kinds of programs. After wasting more hours than I care to admit developing and documenting network formats used to exchange relatively simple kinds of information between programs, I was very happy to discover XML-RPC. It would have made all that work much easier.

Whether you integrate systems within a single network or provide services and information to the public as a whole, XML-RPC provides critical layers of abstraction that make it simple to connect different kinds of computing systems without needing to create new standards for every application. Because XML-RPC is built on commonly available HTTP and XML technologies, the costs of implementing it are low. Because XML-RPC focuses sharply on solving a particular kind of problem -- making procedure calls across a network -- it is very easy to learn and implement across a wide variety of systems.

Audience

Any developer who needs to share information between programs running on different computers will find this book useful, but two classes of developers will find it especially worthwhile:

Integrators

Developers focused on making distributed, and often dissimilar, systems communicate with one another may find that XML-RPC solves some of their thorniest problems in an easier way.

Web developers

Developers wanting to make the information they provide on human-readable sites more widely available ...