Programming Web Services with Perl

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

History of XML-RPC

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has no native understanding of success versus failure in XML-RPC terms. An HTTP

server only knows if it was able to successfully handle a request and send a valid

response. HTTP error codes in the 400 (request incomplete) or 500 (server error)

ranges can indicate only that the HTTP server had problems, not the XML-RPC

code.

Any time a server receives a request and can give a response, the HTTP response

code must be

200, the basic HTTP success indicator. This holds true for faults as well

as successful returns, which is why faults are used to communicate problems. The

range of fault types for XML-RPC is theoretically unbounded, but the range of error

codes for HTTP is finite. Additionally, not all servers can attach arbitrary documents

to error messages. In other words, HTTP error codes just wouldn’t work. So, unless

the URL is invalid, or the server is down, the HTTP layer reports success.

Example 3-7 shows the same response message as Example 3-5, but with server-side

headers and the HTTP response line added. The content is abbreviated, and depend-

ing on the server in use, the complete set of headers may be much longer.

In Chapter 4, when toolkits are discussed, we will cover the merits of using an

Apache server with

mod_perl enabled. Suffice it to say, mod_perl can make an XML-

RPC environment even more efficient, when coded and configured properly.

Method Signatures and Overloading

By design, XML-RPC treats the remotely executable procedures as strongly typed.

While languages such as Perl or PHP may operate fine with arbitrary parameters

passed in, languages such as Java and C are much more demanding about the integ-

rity of their arguments list. Many server implementations address this by tracking the

number, order, and type of parameters a procedure or method may accept. This is

often referred to as the signature of the remote call.

Example 3-7. XML-RPC response with HTTP headers

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Connection: close

Content-Length: 138

Content-Type: text/xml

Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 11:20:13 GMT

Server: Apache/1.3.23 (Unix) mod_perl/1.26

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<methodResponse>

<params>

<param>

<value><int>1</int></value>

</param>

</params>

</methodResponse>