Re: [xml] Creating a markup language

[Robert Sanderson <azaroth liverpool ac uk>]

On Thu, 5 Aug 2004, Bob Rossi wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 05, 2004 at 04:29:22PM +0100, Robert Sanderson wrote:

> > With either XML-RPC or SOAP you don't need to transport them via HTTP.
> Sorry if I am overly ignorant, this is my first XML project. So far, I
> have only read "Learning XML", which is how I got here :)

:)

XML-RPC and SOAP are slightly different approaches to the same thing. In 
my opinion SOAP is the better choice today as its endorsed by the W3C and 
the industry in general, but that's not to say XML-RPC is bad, just 
different. I'll talk about SOAP, because that's what I know.

SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol.  It's XML which is sent via 
some transport mechanism from A to B.  At A you give the toolkit an object 
and it encodes it for you in XML. You would probably need to write the 
transportation code as you've got your own pipes etc. At B, the toolkit 
then parses the XML and reconstructs the object.

This object could be data, or it is more often a request to do something.

There's some standard rules for what the XML encoding looks like, but they 
can be changed so long as both ends know what a tag means.

> Or another question that could help me better understand what XML-RPC
> is. Is XML-RPC a Markup Language, just like MathML?

Google for 'SOAP xml introduction' or XML-RPC and you'll find hundreds of 
explanations.

A simple example:

<simpleRequest>
  <numberOfRecords xsi:type="integer">3</numberOfRecords>
  <recordSchema xsi:type="string">MODS</recordSchema>
</simpleRequest>

might serialise to a 'simpleRequest' object with two properties, 
'numberOfRecords' and 'recordSchema'.


> libxml linked into it, since apparently it is very portable.  Does this
> mean I am up the creek when it comes to XML-RPC?, or can I manually
> create documents that meet this specification?

You definitely can manually create the XMLRPC/SOAP documents by hand.

Rob


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