On Wed, Nov 02, 2005 at 11:43:08PM +0100, Olivier Lefevre wrote:
> With XML-RPC you need some middleware, if I understand this correctly,
> an HTTP server more precisely, which opens up a whole can of worms.

Nah. XML-RPC was designed with web services in mind, but it amounts to
no more than sending a suitable XML document to some URL and getting
one back. So, as Max notes, stdin will work equally well (though I
imagine stateful conversations would be desirable, so expecting to
send just a single document may be oversimplifying).

Of course, I don't know how closely tied to HTTP and TCP existing
XML-RPC libraries are in general. One would hope not too closely, for
the sake of sanity. Certainly the Apache Java implementation is
trivial to adapt.

And of course using XML-RPC means that Darcs can easily become a real
web service for anyone who wants it (I quite like the idea of being able
to use HTTP with SSL authentication rather than SSH as a means for a
local Darcs to talk to a remote Darcs, for example).

> On 
> the plus side XML-rpc libraries are available for all languages, so that 
> leaves you with "just" the API design job. Still that would rate as an 
> obese design in my book.

It may be more code, but it's probably less coding. Especially once
you have a few clients out there written in different languages, which
seems pretty inevitable in this community.

-- Jamie Webb

_______________________________________________
darcs-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.abridgegame.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users

Reply via email to