Hello Iuri,
yesterday I took the chance to refresh my background on this kind of technologies. I am resuming my findings, sorry if I write things you already know:
- XML-RPC is the ancestor of SOAP, which is a more feature rich specification for this kind of remote calls. I have dealt with SOAP in the past, but didn't know about this. [1]
- XML-RPC is not the most throughput-efficient technology around: XML must be parsed back and forth all the time, with computational and bandwidth overhead. This holds also for SOAP. [1] [2]
- Most if not all the things you can achieve with XML-RPC/SOAP could be done by a simple HTTP API, or better by a RESTful webservice [1] [2] [3]
- HTTP API is not a RESTful webservice [4] [5]
This brought to me the following questions/considerations I want to debate with you (and maybe others) before we proceed:
- is XML-RPC a requirement for you? I mean, do you have to interact with applications that speak XML-RPC only? Why don't go with plain HTTP calls?
- as we are considering to revamp this old package, shouldn't we go all the way down including also SOAP in the mix?
More specifical to your problem:
- XML-RPC package relies on ns_xml module, which I don't know. Is it available for naviserver? How does it differ from tdom?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20130511053512/http://joncanady.com/blog/2010/01/14/if-you-have-rest-why-xml-rpc/
[4] http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS
Antonio
