Eye on Winer

Many times, the things Dave writes on Scripting.com are bizarre. Usually, though, they’re just bizarre and neurotic opinions. Seldom does Dave say something so inherently, flatly, and factually incorrect as what he said today:

Today’s XML-RPC is exactly as it was 10 years ago, which, if you were developing XML-RPC apps means that your apps still work, and that’s a good thing. Nothing that’s come along before or since rivals XML-RPC for simplicity and utility.

False. Just plain false. Dave believes that it’s true because he uses an ancient piece of software that does nothing but XML-RPC, but the “simple” fact of the matter is that, from the ground up, nothing is more simple than REST is. Take a look.

Here’s a sample XML-RPC request:

< ?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodcall>
   <methodname>examples.getStateName</methodname> 
      <params> 
         <param> <value><i4>41</i4></value> </param> 
      </params> 
</methodcall>

There’s a lot of complexity there. Just take a look and try to imagine that you’ve never seen XML-RPC before. Now let’s take a look at REST.

http://url.com/MethodName?param=value

Oh, yeah, Dave. XML-RPC is sooo much simpler.

Tags: XML-RPC

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under Dave, Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.