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

To: xen-devel <xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Matt Sottile <matt@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Xen-devel] a last comment on xml-rpc
From: Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2006 15:39:17 -0700
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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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