[Xen-devel] a last comment on xml-rpc

[Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@xxxxxxxx>]

we get this kind of note all the time, and just got another one.

Chessbrain II, which used to use XML-RPC, has moved to Matt's 
s-expression library. For more on chessbrain:
"It is being used in two projects, msgCourier (an open source messaging 
server) and on the ChessBrain project.  ChessBrain is a distributed 
computing project (similar to SETI@home) that plays the game of chess 
using thousands of computers.  ChessBrain was awarded a 2005 Guinness 
World Record involving distributed computation (see 
http://www.chessbrain.net and http://www.msgcourier.com).  The new 
ChessBrain II (which has been in development for two years now) will 
utilize msgCourier during its next world record attempt in Copenhagen. 
The underlying communication protocol will use s-expr and Matt's sfsexp."

I think Xen made the right decision, in the beginning, to use s-exprs. 
We have heard from any number of places that learned the hard way that 
XML is a really poor foundation for RPC.
I hope you will reconsider going to XML-RPC. I don't think the existence 
of python support is sufficient. The whole point of RPC, in fact, is to 
let any client talk to any server, without regard to language or 
environment. We know in practice that trivial C programs can use 
s-expression based RPC; we've seen how awful the XML parsers in C can 
be; do you really want to lock C out of this picture?
thanks

ron



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