[Phpwm] SOAP/XMLRPC/ Web services question

[David Goodwin]

Elliot Smith wrote:
> Hello David,
> 
> David Goodwin wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm trying to be lazy and get someone else to answer this question
>> without doing a quick and dirty demo... so here goes....
>>
>> A client needs a remotely callable API for 3rd parties to hook into. To
>> me this means Soap or XMLRPC or perhaps SCA/SDO ...
> I'd definitely go with REST, using as much of the existing HTTP stack as 
> you can. That way you just use HTTP authentication, cookies and sessions 
> as per usual; the semantics of status codes, headers etc. replace the 
> ugly machinery of SOAP envelopes; XML or JSON are used for data 
> representaton (preferably standards-based if possible). I'd only use 
> SOAP if you really have to support transactions which cross multiple 
> HTTP requests.
> 
> "RESTful Web Services" (O'Reilly), if you haven't read it already, 
> contains probably most of what you need to know. It's an excellent 
> starting point.
> 


Thanks! I'm still not clear on what the difference between them is 
though. Why REST and not XMLRPC? Do more 'clients' support XMLRPC than 
REST (or vice versa).

 From looking at the Zend Framework server/client components, XMLRPC 
'seems' better, as :

  - There's no need to have ->get() on the end of function calls.
  - It supports namespaces...


David.