Another XML-RPC review

I just noticed that the London Perl Mongers review the XML-RPC book. Thanks to Dean Wilson for a pretty balanced review.

As the author of the ASP/COM section, I'd like to take a minute to answer a valid criticisim of that chapter that Wilson raises:

My only disappointment with this chapter is that it relegates the mention of the COM based XML-RPC library to two paragraphs tucked away at the end of the chapter and does no more than acknowledge its existence and provide a link. Adding another small section covering its use with something like Visual Basic would have been a welcome addition.

At the time of that book's writing, the COM XML-RPC library looked moldy and forgotten. I was none too keen to drive people to use it. I don't have Visual Studio, so I couldn't really experiment with that library anyway (which would have required a C++ compiler, I believe). When the next edition of the book comes out, I'll see if we can't flesh out that chapter a bit more with more Windows Tech (eek!).

Wilson also pointed out that I mixed a fair amount of Perl into that chapter. I had two reasons for doing so. The first reason was didactic: I wanted to stress the language independence of the protocol. I would have like to have seen more of that in the book, actually. The second reason is that I wanted to reach out to Unix bigots like myself who might see XML-RPC as a way to control Winders boxen without haven't to do much programming on them. XML-RPC has the potential to create easy remote admin tools -- very useful for controlling point'n'click environments from a remote unix shell. ;-)

Thanks again to Dean Wilson for taking the time to review the book.

[Original use.perl.org post and comments.]