The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Thursday, August 23, 2001

The Blogger API via XML-RPC over HTTP on top of TCP/IP

I'm beginning to see what all this XML-RPC is all about. It's a more formal specification of the WWW CGI because I guess reading the HTML source and finding out the input fields for a form, then URLencode the data to call the external program is just too much work for some people.

I've done work before, using, I guess, a form of CGI-RPC to implement a program that does an Internet search using the major search engines to gather the results. And yes, it's was (and still is to a degree) a pain because each engine basically has a different calling convention (or API if you will). XML-RPC seems to be a way to standardize on an API, such as a search engine API.

Not that it's a bad idea, but XML seems a bit overbloated for me. But I guess for the type of services being done, like the Blogger API it's not that bad of overhead. And just think, if I can implement the Blogger XML-RPC API, not only can I claim alphabet-soup compliancy, but I can use several tools to write my blogger with, not just using a web form or email.

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