Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to create a standard protocol for remote procedure calls (RPC). While the techniques and technology for remote procedure calls have differed, the intent of RPC was and is the same to this day: enable an application running on one machine to call a procedure in a separate process running on another machine. Ideally, a well-designed RPC protocol can connect any two machines interconnected via the Internet or some other network, even if the machines have different hardware or run different operating systems.
Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to create a standard protocol for remote procedure calls (RPC). While the techniques and technology for remote procedure calls have differed, the intent of RPC was and is the same to this day: enable an application running on one machine to call a procedure in a separate process running on another machine. Ideally, a well-designed RPC protocol can connect any two machines interconnected via the Internet or some other network, even if the machines have different hardware or run different operating systems.
Java has its own technology for remote procedure calls named Remote Method Invocation (RMI). However, like other RPC technologies such as the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Open Network Computing RPC from Sun, RMI is very complex.
A refreshingly simple, but effective alternative to RMI (and SOAP and others) is XML-RPC. XML-RPC, which was intentionally designed to be easy to learn and easy to implement, exchanges information using a combination of HTTP and XML.
XML-RPC was first released in 1998 as a draft specification by Dave Winer of UserLand Software, and was first implemented in Frontier, UserLand’s content management system. However, the draft took on a life of its own, and now appears in software from Red Hat (the Red Hat Network, a subscription service that enables Linux systems to be updated over the Internet, makes heavy use of XML-RPC) and many other developers in the commercial and open source world.
Using XML-RPC,…
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