NYCPHP Meetup

[Hans Zaunere]

Interesting subject, as I've just been pondering the same issues. 
Thanks to the wonders of Barnes and Noble, I did a lot of free reading
this weekend on this very thing, actually.

While I am by far not an expert at this point (and will tend to throw
my personal bias in) I like XMLRPC much more.  SOAP, while it wants to
be good, is just too bloated.  Of all things XML, XMLRPC looks nicest
(IMHO) and I've seen the most written about:

http://xmlrpc-epi.sourceforge.net/main.php?t=php_about
http://xmlrpc.usefulinc.com/

A little XML rant follows:  While XML means well, and is an interesting
idea, it just doesn't make any sense to use, what esssentially is HTML,
to markup so much varied data.  To me, data should be organized
properly in the first place, and XML becomes quite worthless.  After
browsing many books on all things related I've realized that XML
requires an ENOURMOUS overhead, both human and computational.  That
said, I do think there must exist good uses for XML and related
technologies (ie enhanced HTML, or what's really XHTML), however I'm
just going to be careful not to think XML is a panacea for all data. 
Lastly, I've been doing some web service stuff lately as well and have
been using strictly PHP serializing - it works great, is fast, and if
it really needs to be in XML for another language, there are
converters.

Sorry for the rant - flames are welcome. :)

Hans Z.



--- evan heller <evan.heller at alum.rpi.edu> wrote:
> Ok, which should I be considering to use? XML-RPC 
> or SOAP? I would like to start a simple webservice 
> for data retrieval for parts of my site and was
> wondering
> which one I should go with. 
> 
> It seems as of now that there's more PHP resources
> for XML-RPC so it that better? Also if I go with
> one of these, 
> which PHP implementation is best since there are
> quite a few
> and most seem to be in alpha stages (not for
> production).
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> -Evan
> 
> -- 
> 
> Evan Heller     
> evan.heller at alum.rpi.edu
> 


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