Talk:XML-RPC/Archive 1

Untitled
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.96.237.202 (talk) 12:39, 30 March 2010 (UTC) Small and Simple is beautifull.. Compared to the overweight SOAP. geez. what are people thinking off

References to the optional multicall and introspetion features would be great. http://scripts.incutio.com/xmlrpc/introspection.html seems to describe the introspection quite well, but I couldn't find a good source for multicall information.

The most useful multicall description seems to be offline at the moment. Here's the archive link: http://web.archive.org/web/20060502175739/http://www.xmlrpc.com/discuss/msgReader$1208

Here is what www.xmlrpc.ru delivered (whitespace cleaned up for readablity)

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:18:21 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.8b mod_bwlimited/1.4 Last-Modified: Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:00:00 GMT ETag: "b810c3-3d5-455f78bf1b800" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 981 Content-Type: text/html



<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

XML-RPC Home Page 











   

Be careful when you click on an external link!!

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.217.179.111 (talk) 15:29, 18 September 2008 (UTC)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Crusadio (talk • contribs)

Criticism
I was researching using XML-RPC with Python and found this wikipedia page which was quite useful. I got to the criticism section and found that the link provided pointed to an unreliable source. Also, there were plenty of rebuttals to the criticism on that non-published source page. I felt that the criticism needed to come from a published source, or at the very least represent the counter-claims as well. I felt misled by the criticism once I actually clicked on the link and read all of the replies to the criticism. I'm not sure of the validity of the criticism either at this point. Anyway, I'm not sure what the appropriate thing to do would be whether it be to remove the section or to find a more reliable published source that had some balanced criticism. Thoughts? Rcronk (talk) 20:43, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Completely agreed. The critisism makes absolutely no sense, and a link to an uninformed question on StackOverflow is not a source. I'm deleting, if someone is prepared to find real sources, you know where to find it. LosD (talk) 06:35, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

Dear Rcronk and LosD: I dispute the assertion that StackOverflow is an unreliable source. It is a community generated source and it has editorial oversight and is "published", and after reading the unreliable source page, I feel it qualifies as a reliable source. If you feel that the accepted answer is incorrect, please post your rebuttals on the StackOverflow page. You may also email me on: tim@edval.com.au. I am interested to know what the "plenty of rebuttals" are...I am keen to continue the discussion and will gladly accept someone else's StackOverflow answer rather than my own. Tim Cooper Tcotco (talk) 02:00, 20 January 2010 (UTC)


 * It's pretty obvious that the source is unreliable accroding to Reliable source examples. I can say the following about Stackoverflow:
 * Posts on stackoverflow are rarely regarded as reliable sources, because they are easily forged or misrepresented, and many are anonymous or pseudonymous.
 * There is no fact-checking process and no guarantee of quality of reliability.
 * Anyone can register and post an answer.
 * The one caviat being this. However I can't see StackOverflow meeting this requirement. None of us are challenging the provided answer, we're simply saying that this doesn't qualify as a reliable source according to wikipedia's rules. Thebwt (talk) 14:28, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

88.96.237.202 wrote: I have added a Neutral Point Of View to the Criticism section because the sentence "This criticism is only referenced here in one single StackOverflow post; the advantages of the XML-RPC standard seem to outweigh this criticism." Appears to be baseless personal opinion. If there were more citations the first half of the sentence would be more acceptable, but the evidence in the citation given is far from unequivocal.

Dear 88.96.237.202: Did you mean "the first half of the paragraph" or "the first half of the sentence starting "This criticism..." ?  Again, note that anyone can debate the issue in StackOverflow.   Tcotco (talk) 22:52, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

XML-RPC Patent
Is it enforceable? It was claimed quite a few years after the protocol had been described! Does it make sense? Imagine Sir Tim Berners-Lee decides to patent HTTP?! Ifomichev (talk) 13:28, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Patents
My name is Joe Lapp, one of the authors of the XML-RPC patent. I just wanted to point out that this article confuses the patent with the Userland protocol of the same name. The patent is on the use of XML for remote procedure call over the web, which subsumes fundamental aspects of both SOAP and Userland's XML-RPC, but which itself is neither. This article appears to equate different specifications for their identical titles.

Just to clarify the timing, we developed our original protocol at the end of 1997, finishing in January 1998. I was tasked with writing the patent application and claiming things every way possible, and I'm a perfectionist (with other duties as well, like XQL), so the application was delivered in provisional stages. It appears that the full application was finally filed in March 1999, but I'm getting that date from the application itself because I don't remember exactly.

As I recall, we discovered that Userland was working on their XML-RPC during our discussions with Microsoft in early 1998. Userland was taking an approach similar to what we had done, but Microsoft had designed SOAP as a direct XML-serialization of DCOM, without taking advantage of XML's ability to semantically label data. It took considerable convincing to get Microsoft to redo SOAP so that it wasn't hardcoded to a single XML vocabulary. Microsoft later ended up starting over with SOAP, making SOAP's entry in the space very late, basing the new SOAP on the techniques that webMethods and Userland were promoting.

I found the following text a little cheeky: "XML-RPC was created in 1998 by Dave Winer... XML-RPC was patented by [others] in April 2006..." Again, despite identical titles, the two specs are not the same. I have little idea of the timing of events at Userland with regard to XML-RPC. My job was to patent based on our apparent 1997/1998 priority status.

--Jtlapp (talk) 01:38, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

(See below for 'Neutral Point of View')