xml-dev - Re: XML-RPC or SOAP

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 09:52 AM 8/4/00 -0700, Dave Winer wrote:
>What does the size of a project have to do with it?

Volume of traffic can matter, as can the complexity created by multiple
flows that might interact with each other in some way.

>How do you measure the size of a project?

You can't measure them in any objective way.  Amazing how different people
see 'size' differently.

>Further, the complexities (or lack of) in any protocol are completely hidden
>behind APIs. I do SOAP and XML-RPC with equal ease. The only issue is what
>they interoperate with. (And perhaps performance, but I doubt if there's any
>difference between the two encodings.)

You can hide the protocol complexity behind the API, but you can't easily
hide the side-effects of going out to the network to get an answer,
especially in programs with multiple threads where sequence might matter.

None of that's impossible to hide, by any means - but it does take some
extra consideration to make the rope work the way it's supposed to.

Don't get me wrong - I like XML-RPC very very much.  It does what it does
very well.  'What it does' is a _little_ trickier than a normal function
call, though.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books