XML-RPC turns 8
As Ed Cone points out in his very first post on his new official Ziff blog, and as Dave Winer proudly announces on his own blog, “Today is the 8th birthday of XML-RPC.” So, Web Services are now an eight-year-old technology. Sort of.
XML-RPC was the beginning of it all. The question is, has it really come that far? With the rapidly-emerging alphabet soup of the WS-I and OASIS Web Services working groups, and all of the proposed specs and working implementations, we’ve certainly got a more complex set of Web services interfaces to call upon. In some cases, that may not be a good thing.
Sure, we have something approaching interoperability for many of the Web services implementations out there now. But most Web services are just as insecure right now (despite the WS-Security spec) as XML-RPC is, and the only fix at the moment is a hardware solution…which could do the same for XML-RPC. The main advantage the WS-Basic standard set has is the UDDI directory service for finding (and managing the lifecycle of) Web services, and the Web Services Definition Language for accellerating the development cycle required to connect to Web services.
XML-RPC was kicked out the door by Dave Winer while SOAP hung in a political miasma. It is intended for simple interactions between remote applications. But the structure of XML-RPC calls can become unwieldly at times because of its simplicity. SOAP solves some of those problems, but it introduces other problems. XML-RPC was designed to map well to object-oriented programming models, whereas SOAP…. well, it doesn’t.
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on Saturday, April 15th, 2006 at 12:43 pm and is filed under globals.
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XML-RPC turns 8
As Ed Cone points out in his very first post on his new official Ziff blog, and as Dave Winer proudly announces on his own blog, “Today is the 8th birthday of XML-RPC.” So, Web Services are now an eight-year-old technology. Sort of.
XML-RPC was the beginning of it all. The question is, has it really come that far? With the rapidly-emerging alphabet soup of the WS-I and OASIS Web Services working groups, and all of the proposed specs and working implementations, we’ve certainly got a more complex set of Web services interfaces to call upon. In some cases, that may not be a good thing.
Sure, we have something approaching interoperability for many of the Web services implementations out there now. But most Web services are just as insecure right now (despite the WS-Security spec) as XML-RPC is, and the only fix at the moment is a hardware solution…which could do the same for XML-RPC. The main advantage the WS-Basic standard set has is the UDDI directory service for finding (and managing the lifecycle of) Web services, and the Web Services Definition Language for accellerating the development cycle required to connect to Web services.
XML-RPC was kicked out the door by Dave Winer while SOAP hung in a political miasma. It is intended for simple interactions between remote applications. But the structure of XML-RPC calls can become unwieldly at times because of its simplicity. SOAP solves some of those problems, but it introduces other problems. XML-RPC was designed to map well to object-oriented programming models, whereas SOAP…. well, it doesn’t.
This entry was posted
on Saturday, April 15th, 2006 at 12:43 pm and is filed under globals.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.