Using XML-RPC with PHP (
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Do you want your Perl code on one server to call your PHP functions on another? "Impossible!" you say? Not with XML-RPC. XML-RPC is a standard way for any application to make requests and recieve responses from methods written in any language. Interested? I knew you would be.What is XML-RPC?XML-RPC was developed by UserLand Software (
http://www.userland.com) in April of 1998 as
a technology to enable applications to talk to each other, no matter what
language they are written in or where they are running. Since then, many
implementations have been made beyond the original one for UserLand's Frontier
product, and many major companies have adopted the technology for their
products, including Microsoft's .NET and Apple's Mac OS X.
XML-RPC is a
great enabler for distributed systems and system interoperability, as it allows
any XML-RPC enabled applications to call the methods of other XML-RPC enabled
applications, regardless of what language either application is written in, or
on what machine either application is running on. This allows a perl function to
make a call to a Python method, or a Java Servlet to call a PHP function, for
example.
The upshot of XML-RPC is that a world of completely
heterogeneous applications can talk to each other with very little work from
their programmers.
What is covered in this articleThis article
will cover installing PHP with XML-RPC support, examples of XML-RPC requests and
responses, the basic functions used for XML-RPC requests, creating an XML-RPC
server, creating an XML-RPC client, and suggests some resources for more
information on XML-RPC.