Re: How to Implement an XMLRPC Server in Python?

[Guilherme Polo]

On 10/29/08, Zix <sa*******@yahoo.co.inwrote:

Hello,
I am a newbie to python and trying to get a hang of some of its
advanced features through an application I am building. Basically, I'd
like to build a weather forecasting web service. The clients should be
able to query the service with a location and date and get back the
weather forecast.

After reading a lot on the topic I've settled on the following:
* not using any python frameworks (Django, pylons etc)
* exposing the service through an XMLRPC API using Python 2.4.3
(that's the python version on CentOS 5.2)

Why did you decide to "expose" a web service through xmlrpc instead of
actually exposing it by using a restful web service ?

The links pointed by the previous email should help you, but well, I'm
still surprised on this decision specially because you said you read a
lot about this topic.

* using mod_wsgi ( http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/ ) instead of
mod_python

So far, I've just created the database design and been focusing on
that. But now I realize I've been procrastinating because I am not
sure how to really go about implementing this (the docs on xml rpc
python module are especially sparse). Please advice.

--
-- Guilherme H. Polo Goncalves

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Guilherme Polo schrieb:

On 10/29/08, Zix <sa*******@yahoo.co.inwrote:

>Hello,
I am a newbie to python and trying to get a hang of some of its
advanced features through an application I am building. Basically, I'd
like to build a weather forecasting web service. The clients should be
able to query the service with a location and date and get back the
weather forecast.

After reading a lot on the topic I've settled on the following:
* not using any python frameworks (Django, pylons etc)
* exposing the service through an XMLRPC API using Python 2.4.3
(that's the python version on CentOS 5.2)

Why did you decide to "expose" a web service through xmlrpc instead of
actually exposing it by using a restful web service ?

The links pointed by the previous email should help you, but well, I'm
still surprised on this decision specially because you said you read a
lot about this topic.

What is wrong with XMLRPC? I've implemented both kind of systems, and
while REST has it's strengths in a HTML-centric environment, a real RCP
mechanism with built-in type marshalling known to both sides of the
communication is for pure interoperability better.

Diez

[Zix]

On Oct 29, 11:26*pm, "Daniel Fetchinson" <[e-mail]>
wrote:

These pages might be useful, they include example code:

Thanks Daniel, they do help.

On Oct 29, 11:42*pm, "Guilherme Polo" <[e-mail]:

Why did you decide to "expose" a web service through xmlrpc instead of
actually exposing it by using a restful web service ?
...
I'm still surprised on this decision specially because you said you
read a lot about this topic.

The basic idea behind this app is for me to get comfortable in
building web applications with Python. The REST architechture, while
sounding simple seemed a bit too much work to implement. I am
comfortable with xmlrpc since I've built xmlrpc clients using Perl. So
in summary, no REST because I felt lazy. :)

(I do like how Google has implemented REST with their GData API -
http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/overview.html - they also offer
GData python client library. A GData "server" in Python would be cool!)