Day: October 22, 2002

The Register: Via has ultra small PC mobo – now, where do you put it?

How true.

Will Cox:

I’m worth a million in prizes

It seems that developers everywhere are scrambling to take care of the RSS bandwidth issue.  That’s awesome.

RSS Validator: Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim have teamed up to tame the RSS feeds.  We got a sneak peek of the RSS Validator at Web Services DevCon East, but it’s great to see it live.  My feed validates, how about yours?

Jeremy Zawodny has figured out his problems with threading in MySQL on FreeBSD:

If you compile your own MySQL server on FreeBSD and link with the LinuxThreads library, make sure to compile with the -DHAVE_BROKEN_REALPATH option.

The short version is that FreeBSD’s realpath() isn’t thread-safe. That causes badness with LinuxThreads on FreeBSD, because MySQL uses lots of relative paths and globally shared file descriptors may end up pointing to all the wrong places. I’ll explain in more detail if I get a chance.

XML-RPC is Not Dead Yet

Rogers Cadenhead:

I had a chance this past week to evaluate Apache XML-RPC, an open source Java class library for XML-RPC programming.

It’s a nicely designed library that makes it trivial to create an XML-RPC server or software that makes XML-RPC calls. Remote methods are called in a manner comparable to calling any other method in Java — XML-RPC and networking are handled by the library.

Once you have figured out which Java data types to use in remote method calls and remote methods, described in this table, it’s easy to add XML-RPC support to a Java class.

Keith Devens is working on version 3.0 of his PHP XML-RPC library.  Here’s what he’s thinking about so far:

I’m making it even easier to build servers. You may be able to do it in one line of code, we’ll see

Include SSL support. I’ve gotten this request a few times. I’m planning to include a separate and optional method to make a connection which will use cURL and support SSL. Does it make sense to also support HTTP authentication?

You should never have to call XMLRPC_prepare yourself again.

I’m probably also going to include my “method not found” method, just to save you from having to write your own. Not that it’s hard, but it’s only about 3 additional lines in the library.

And yes, XML-RPC still matters.  Even in a world of SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, and buckets of other acronyms and standards.  Sometimes you just want to get something really simple done.