Customer Reviews

Programming Web Services with XML-RPC (O'Reilly Internet Series)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As with most O'Reilly books, this one is a comprehensive treatment of an emerging technology, and is probably destined to become a standard reference on the subject as it moves into mainstream development. Unfortunately, it is not without its flaws.

The book does an excellent job of covering What XML-RPC is, what it does, and how it can be used from a variety of programming environmments to build web-services, including touching on my web-development environment of choice, Zope.

Notable in it's absence however (and the reason I gave this book four stars instead of five), is any mention in the book's main text of the environment that spawned XML-RPC, UserLand Frontier. Although Dave Winer (creator of Frontier) wrote the foreword to the book, I think that some coverage should have been given to using Frontier with XML-RPC.

I could wish that the subject of designing web services had taken center-stage, rather than some specific implementations, but the design of web-services is covered more than adequately in chapter eight.

Make no mistake, this is an excellent book, especially if you build web applications in any of the five programming environments covered (Perl, Python, ASP, PHP, Java), and I can reccomend it wholeheartedly to anyone who is creating or designing web-services.

This book explains fully how to use XML-RPC in five languages: Java, PHP, Perl, Python, and ASP. Becuase XML-RPC is so simple to use (I got it working for both Java and PHP), it does not take much explanation to set up this technology and actually use it. This book is a good up-to-date reference for this technology, which will has been established and is being implemented in more and more languages as time progresses, making this technology an alternative to CORBA.
This is a small book, because the subject is very easy and fast to learn. By using the Universal Language XML, This technology enables programs in one language to call procedures in programs in another language across the internet, regardless of firewalls, because it runs on HTTP.
Some of the possibilities of using XML-RPC are in SOAP applications, distributed applications, even internet games.

Good coverage but a bit repetitive since it explains
the same thing for each of several languages. Only
read the chapters you need... Sadly XML/RPC seems
to be losing ground to .NET/SOAP which is a shame
coz RPC is much simpler and less bandwidth intensive.

The book is dated, and some of the examples, like the ones using Python are out of sync with current libraries. But, overall, the book is still valuable.It begins with a nice forward from an XML-RPC insider - Dave Winer;he was intimately involved in the evolution of the XML-RPC spec and you get a rare glimpse into the discussions that resulted in the technology spec - something that you rarely find in tech books. The next best thing about the book are the authors - they are totally in charge of the subject being developers themselves and experienced authors. With reasonable examples,tips and insights on XML-RPC - the technology itself, plus various language implementations of XML-RPC libraries, this book written on an under hyped and flawed,but successful loose integration and web services technology is a good read. Apart from sections explaining the protocol itself, the major portion of the book is devoted to Java,Perl, and Python implementations of the standard, integrating web applications with XML-rpc using PHP,and bridging ASP and COM.

Not many people are aware of how the whole idea behind SOAP and, later, Webservices, started from XML-RPC. It covers some interesting background information on how XML-RPC was born, and good coverage of its strengths and shortcomings, plus examples in five different languages (Perl, Python, ASP, PHP, Java)

overall an okay book. charpter 3 is poorly written (no complete example showing how to use servlet as XML RPCserver! perhaps the author have never done it himself) the reader should wait for a better book on this topic.