Chapter 1. What is XML-RPC?

XML-RPC is a simple, portable way to make remote procedure calls over HTTP. It can be used with Perl, Java, Python, C, C++, PHP and many other programming languages. Implementations are available for Unix, Windows and the Macintosh.

Here's a short XML-RPC client written in Perl. (We use Ken MacLeod's Frontier::Client module.)

    use Frontier::Client;
    $server = Frontier::Client->new(url => 'http://betty.userland.com/RPC2');
    $name = $server->call('examples.getStateName', 41);
    print "$name\n";

When run, this program will connect to the remote server, get the state name, and print it. (State #41 should be South Dakota in this example.)

Here's the same program in Python. (This time, we use Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib.)

    >>> import xmlrpclib
    >>> server = xmlrpclib.Server("http://betty.userland.com/RPC2")
    >>> server.examples.getStateName(41)
    'South Dakota'

In the following chapters, you'll learn how to write XML-RPC clients and servers in a variety of programming languages.