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I worked with Edd Dumbill[1] to bring HTTPS and certificate support to the PHP XML-RPC bindings. It was one of my very first open source contributions and inter

I worked with Edd Dumbill[1] to bring HTTPS and certificate support to the PHP XML-RPC bindings. It was one of my very first open source contributions and interactions, and it was super empowering. I was running the tech at Voxel.net at the time, an early web hosting provider to many open source projects. We were using XML-RPC to write the beginnings of Ubersmith[2], which was our billing, hosting, and support management platform. Later, those bindings made it into very early Drupal core[3] and onto thousands of websites. In this era, you could make desktop apps talk to websites using an XML-RPC gateway — for content management or many other tasks. Yes, XML and related tech is fairly horrible, but context is everything. If you were running servers, there was enormous pressure to use Microsoft. If you were by chance running open source (LAMP stack), making applications work together was a challenge. Interoperability was not the norm, despite a pretty rich internet. Formats and standards were the problem. You would email code patches around. There was no GitHub, and SourceForge was only starting to gain traction. If were using open source version control in this era, you were likely on CVS, which was an "improvement" over RCS, but still nothing like the promised future tech of Subversion, which wasn't text-backed. Text-backed! Versions of files were concatenated, and instead of force pushing, you opened this concatenation abomination in a text editor to hack the repo history (if you were a bad, bad person, but needed to get the job done). As mentioned many other places in this thread, if you were doing open source interop, the heavyweight option was SOAP. XML-RPC was as much a breath of fresh air as JSON is to XML. Fairly-literal text was bloated, slow, and XML even more so, but it was all pretty cutting edge for the time. [1] https://www.xml.com/pub/au/11 https://www.xml.com/pub/au/11 [2] https://ubersmith.com https://ubersmith.com [3] https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal/-/blob/4.0.x/includes/xmlrpc.inc#L443 https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal/-/blob/4.0.x/inclu...

nolok 4y ago
Anyone who touched SOAP or CORBA for any amount of time larger than an hour have fond memories of XML RPC, despite all the flaws. I know I do.
- icedchai 4y ago
  SOAP was also incredibly verbose, but being able to generate both client code and server stub code off of the spec (WSDL) was useful. There was no tedious hand coding of clients like you'd often see with REST.
jalfresi 4y ago
Have to agree with this - context is everything and there are an awful lot of naive comments here who don’t understand that XML-RPC was a breath of fresh air compared to SOAP, especially if like me you were using the LAMP stack and PHP. SOAP was abysmal- I really don’t recal a single project where communication between two systems using SOAP wasn’t without serious issues, incompatibility issues and just plain broken. Many developers here might not recall serious compatibility issues with Microsoft- the most obvious one I recall was WebDAV ; pretty much strangled at birth by MS terrible broken implementation. I used to use the PHP XML-RPC implementation you worked on for so many projects, so thanks for that- helped me to integrate so many projects, so cheers!

nolok 4y ago

Anyone who touched SOAP or CORBA for any amount of time larger than an hour have fond memories of XML RPC, despite all the flaws. I know I do.

icedchai 4y ago
SOAP was also incredibly verbose, but being able to generate both client code and server stub code off of the spec (WSDL) was useful. There was no tedious hand coding of clients like you'd often see with REST.

jalfresi 4y ago

Have to agree with this - context is everything and there are an awful lot of naive comments here who don’t understand that XML-RPC was a breath of fresh air compared to SOAP, especially if like me you were using the LAMP stack and PHP. SOAP was abysmal- I really don’t recal a single project where communication between two systems using SOAP wasn’t without serious issues, incompatibility issues and just plain broken. Many developers here might not recall serious compatibility issues with Microsoft- the most obvious one I recall was WebDAV ; pretty much strangled at birth by MS terrible broken implementation. I used to use the PHP XML-RPC implementation you worked on for so many projects, so thanks for that- helped me to integrate so many projects, so cheers!