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What is the benefit of XML-RPC over plain XML?

My company has been using XML-RPC for a while, but lately I'm wondering what the benefit is of XML-RPC compared to plain XML. Firstly, it's horrible "obese", consider:

<struct>
    <member>
        <name>ROOM_ID</name>
        <value>
            <int>1</int>
        </value>
    </member>

    <member>
        <name>CODE</name>
        <value>
            <string>MR-101</string>
        </value>
    </member>

    <member>
        <name>NAME</name>
        <value>
            <string>Math Room</string>
        </value>
    </member>

    <member>
        <name>CAPACITY</name>
        <value>
            <int>30</int>
        </value>
    </member>
</struct>

Compared to this:

<room><ROOM_ID>1</ROOM_ID><CODE>MR-101</CODE>
<NAME>Math Room</NAME><CAPACITY>30</CAPACITY></room>

Or even this:

<room ROOM_ID=1 CODE=MR-101 NAME=”Math Room” CAPACITY=30 />

Secondly, XML-RPC seems fairly widespread but not quite ubiquitous and I'm not that impressed with the support for it in C++ and PHP. I've had problems with all the libraries that I tried in both languages.

Thirdly, it seems to me that I could make remote procedure calls with plain XML as easily as with XML-RPC. {(9/9/2009): Every language has libraries for serialising language-level objects into XML. Both XML and XML-RPC require application-level schemas to be defined, for example, how the fields should be spelt, but neither needs any additional schema to be defined. Many people make RPC calls with plain XML.}

So what is the value-add of XML-RPC?

Answer*

The primary value of XmlRpc is that you don't have to write the code to generate and parse the XML documents being passed over HTTP, since XML-RPC is a predefined XML Schema for representing function calls.

Even with less than optimal libraries, there is an additional derived value since using this type of system allows you to define your remote interfaces as basic language interfaces (C++ Abstract Class, Java interfaces, etc.), that are independent of the wire protocol used to communicate between components.

Separating the interface definitions from the wire protocol (XML-RPC, SOAP, etc.) allows you to eventually substitute in alternate protocols where appropriate. For example, in our system, we have services that are exposed using [Hessian][1] for our Flex front ends, and SOAP for our .NET front ends (the Hessian .Net library has a disallowed license).

By sticking with XML-RPC now, you have the option of switching to some other protocol in the future with minimal amounts of refactoring.


  [1]: http://hessian.coucho.com/

Edit Summary*

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With plain XML, there is no need to write code to generate and parse XML documents. I easily found links to libraries that already do this for C# and PHP in exactly the same way libraries do this for XmlRpc. If I had code that did XML then I wouldn't be interested in a multi-wire-protocol API.

Tim Cooper
– Tim Cooper

2009-09-08 01:30:44 +00:00
Commented Sep 8, 2009 at 1:30

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What is the benefit of XML-RPC over plain XML?

Answer*