In article <1019630770.14290.1.camel@pingu>, Edd Dumbill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes >On Tue, 2002-04-23 at 15:30, Julian Bond wrote: >> In article <1019553025.1090.149.camel@pingu>, Edd Dumbill >> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes >> >On Fri, 2002-03-22 at 08:09, Jeff Barr wrote: >> >> Does XML-RPC allow function overloading? >> >> There's a growing feeling that in web services you should "Use named >> parameters. Ignore parameters you don't recognise. Default out >> parameters that are not passed" just as you would in CGI. >> >> In XML-RPC this would mean putting all params in a struct, but it would >> also get rid of the need for function overloading (maybe and partly!). > >This is interesting. This list is no place to start the debate,
But why not, eh? ;-) >nauseatingly rehearsed elsewhere, but taking that feeling to its logical >conclusion: why don't we just pass XML documents with HTTP POST and >GET. XPath can be used to access the 'named parameter space', ie. an >XML document. :-) My own understanding and position on this has been largely built on issues with the Blogger API, Google API and Amazon API and coding in php against them. All three suffer because they are or will be hard to maintain and enhance. Add one parameter or remove one parameter on the server and all the clients will break. With both Blogger and Google they use Java libraries that try to dispatch to a class based on both the function name and on the parameter list. So get the parameter list wrong or incomplete and you get an obscure Java error back. But compare them with the Amazon API. Because they both use a standard protocol (eg SOAP and XMLRPC) with good toolkit support you can write client support in 3 or 4 lines of code and you can do this in almost any environment. The Amazon API is really simple but because they don't use a standard protocol, you've got to write your own custom parser. So the point about "Use named parameters. Ignore parameters you don't recognise. Default out parameters that are not passed" is emphatically not about throwing out SOAP or XML-RPC. It's about coding applications so they don't break later. And maybe we should take this offline, eh? -- Julian Bond email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] CV/Resume: http://www.voidstar.com/cv/ WebLog: http://www.voidstar.com/ M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173 T: +44 (0)192 0412 433 ICQ:33679568 tag:So many words, so little time -- For information about how to subscribe and unsubscribe from this list visit http://xmlrpc.usefulinc.com/list.html
