Peter Hickman wrote:
> Dolazy wrote:
>> 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:
>> <array>
>>   <data>
>>     <value><i4>1404</i4></value>
>>     <value><string>Something here</string></value>
>>     <value><i4>1</i4></value>
>>   </data>
>> </array>
>>
>> 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 :-)
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> 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 :) 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...

-- 
Alex