Passing ruby literals over TPC as an alternative to Xml-Rpc

Ruby
#1

Passing ruby literals seems an easy way to let programs communicate
with each other… And it eliminates the verbosity of XML.

I’ll give an example for those not familiar with literals or xml-rpc:
Instead of sending:


1404
Something here
1

you would be sending:
[ 1404, “Something here”, 1 ]

Do you think it could be a valid alternative to Xml-Rpc?

I would love to hear your insights :slight_smile:

Kind regards,
Francis

#2

Dolazy wrote:

Francis

But if you are using an XML-RPC library you will never see the XML. How
is this a problem?

What you are suggesting would work but then you could also use bencoding
(as used in torrent files), which has a smaller overhead than XML but is
quite flexible.

Sure passing stuff over sockets would work :slight_smile: but why do you feel the
need to replace XML-RPC? There is a little more to XML-RPC than the XML
encoding, ok not much more but it is more than just stuffing things into
XML. The advantages of using XML-RPC is that it will allow other
programming languages to communicate with you without having to write
libraries for your new protocol for half a dozen languages.

Now SOAP, that’s an abomination!

#3

Peter H. wrote:

<value><i4>1</i4></value>

Kind regards,
quite flexible.

Sure passing stuff over sockets would work :slight_smile: but why do you feel the
need to replace XML-RPC? There is a little more to XML-RPC than the XML
encoding, ok not much more but it is more than just stuffing things into
XML. The advantages of using XML-RPC is that it will allow other
programming languages to communicate with you without having to write
libraries for your new protocol for half a dozen languages.

Now SOAP, that’s an abomination!

I’m sure YAML-RPC’s been suggested before, if XML verbosity makes the
hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, and if cross-language
compatibility isn’t an issue, DRb’s the way to go, surely…

#4

You could also take a look at Orbjson (http://orbjson.rubyforge.org/).

Luis