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24 July 2003

I have precisely twelve minutes to write and post this entry, as well as get dressed. Then I’m off out, again. I’ve been playing games, hanging out, watching films, annoying people (I pointed out to someone he’d missed The Breeders at Reading last year — he’s a big Pixies fan and, heck, he went to see Frank Black and the Catholics). So that’s why I want to mention XML-RPC .

Before all this I was still trying to implement pingback. This should be really simple, and would be if I unit tested, but I haven’t being. Why? I don’t know, just call me <insult type="random" reasonNotSpecified="blankness" />.

But anyway. One of the reasons it doesn’t work for me is that it uses XML-RPC. This is a popular method for making, well, remote procedure calls using XML. Pingback uses it, which is sensible: it’s not like we’re creating a well-defined syntax here then debating about whether or not to use it. One of the reasons we should use it is that it ships native data structures about, and you just have to use one of the many available XML-RPC toolkits. Like ASP XML-RPC .

I’m willing to accept that I’m no expert, and this server may be configured differently to theirs. But…

• It doesn’t work with Option Explicit .

• It doesn’t get the HTTP request correctly (I’ll explain later; running out of time).

  Update.

  As far as I can see, the method ASP XML-RPC uses, calling the Request collection, doesn’t do anything. If, as in XML-RPC, you’re receiving a message body, not a series of key-value pairs (or even one), then the only way to get at that message body is BinaryToString(Request.BinaryRead(Request.TotalBytes)). Non-intuitive and slightly convoulted, but at least it actually works.

• When it returns a fault, it sends a complete XML document to your browser. When it returns success, it’ll likely return a string or a fragment of an XML document. This makes displaying the return value a pain.
• It doesn’t use an XML toolkit to generate the XML, preferring to sort-of work things out by hand.

The tools will save us. You don’t need to see the bits on the wire.