XML-RPC Home Page
06-June-2005
XML-RPC Home PageAuthor: Dave Winer
Posted: 6/14/1999; 7:58:47 PM
What is XML-RPC? It's a spec and a set of implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems, running in different environments to make procedure calls over the Internet.
It's remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding. XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and returned.
Representational State Transfer (REST) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
06-June-2005
Representational State Transfer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaRepresentational State Transfer (REST) is a collection of principles for managing information over a computer network like the world wide web. The term originated in a 2000 doctoral dissertation about the web written by Roy Fielding, one of the principal authors of the HTTP protocol specification, and has quickly passed into widespread use in the networking community.
While REST originally referred to a collection of architectural principles (described below), people now often use the term in a looser sense to describe any simple web-based interface that uses XML and HTTP without the extra abstractions of RPC-based approaches like the web services SOAP protocol. Strictly speaking, it is possible (though not common) to design web service systems in accordance with Fielding's REST principles, and it is possible to design simple XML+HTTP interfaces that do not follow REST principles, so these two different uses of REST cause some confusion in technical discussions.
Systems that follow Fielding's REST principles are often referred to as RESTful; REST's most zealous advocates call themselves RESTafarians.
