Re: [Webware-discuss] PickleRPCServlet

[Ian B. <ia...@co...>]

On Fri, 2002-02-01 at 03:07, Chuck Esterbrook wrote:
> I used XML-RPC for the first time this week (eg, WebKit.XMLRPCServlet) 
> but was disappointed by the dummied down data approach it requires, 
> especially the absence of None/nil/NULL.

This is definitely the most annoying part that I've encountered as well
-- I've had some problem with transfering binary data, which XMLRPC
supports but I'm not sure how to use from Python (it *should* just have
an encoding attribute, but base64 is a whole different datatype).

Anyway, it seems easier/better to fix XMLRPC -- maybe silently
converting None to '' -- it could cover up bugs, but it would often be a
reasonable translation.  Alternatively, just add the
not-quite-compatible <nil/> to it.  I looked at xmlrpclib -- I believe
there's a second implementation I haven't looked at (maybe the one
that's now included in Python) -- but the one I looked at is very simple
code.

These should both essentially remain compatible with non-Python
implementations as well, unless perhaps you returned <nil/>.  You could
use User-Agent to handle this if desired.

proposal: http://www.ontosys.com/xml-rpc/extensions.html

XML-RPC seems to handle basic method calls quite well.  It doesn't do
distributed objects, but those are Hard and XML-RPC seems to be pretty
good at doing Easy.

> (BTW Sorry I haven't been on the list lately, but I'm practically 
> unemployed and currently distracted with economics.)

Doesn't is suck that being unemployed doesn't make you feel any more
free than being employed?  

  Ian