Your thoughts on XML-RPC vs REST

[Kumar Raja]

Hi All,

I happened to step on a new topic while browsing, XML-RPC and out of curiousity I took a quick glance and found that it is passing XML over HTTP, which sounded same as REST style. I have to admit that I'm not really an experienced developer and quite often feel nervous when I ever I see a new buzz word :-). Ok, coming to the problem, so what is XML-RPC all about and how is this different from REST.

Thanks

[William Brogden]

These are really two separate concepts.

REST is an architecture which pays strict attention to the use of HTTP methods and what they are allowed to do. A RESTful server is NOT constrained to any particular format for requests and responses such as XML. I know that is the impression everybody gets but XML is NOT a requirement.

XML-RPC is about Remote Procedure Calls formatted as XML messages - it is not constrained to using HTTP as a transport method. RPC is an older concept for client-server interaction than REST. To quote my own article:

The original XML-RPC protocol was invented by Web pioneer Dave Winer at UserLand Software in 1998 and first implemented in the UserLand Frontier development platform (in fact, UserLand Software has trademarked "XML-RPC").

The original XML-RPC uses only a few data types and does not require namespaces. It achieves considerable flexibility by defining <struct> and <array> types which can contain other values.

Bill

[Kumar Raja]

Thank you Bill.

You clarified my misconception about these two technologies.

Thanks