[MUD-Dev] A new MUD-standard

[Kevin Littlejohn]

>>> Bruce wrote
> Kevin Littlejohn wrote:
> 
>>   http://www.bofh.net.au/mud/doc/zwiki/MoebiusXML
 
>> I offer this up in full humility, knowing it will be torn to shreds
>> ;) However, we've implemented this in Moebius as a first-step after
>> wandering through some of these discussions, basically because a)
>> it's easy to handle for any client builder, b) it gives us a base
>> from which to start working on the bigger question of what do you
>> want client and server to be able to do, without worrying about how
>> do you want to define the protocol over which it'll be done.

> Why this over BXXP rather than XML-RPC or SOAP over BXXP?

Firstly, because none of us at the time was comfortable enough with
XML-RPC or SOAP to be authoring such.

Second, because we wanted to directly address the requirements we had
(in terms of the ID per request rather than an HTTP-POST followed by
receive for each request, for instance).  There were some concerns
raised originally about XML-RPC being a little too heavy for this task
- in some respects, we've stripped out tags that we thought were a
waste of space for what we wanted, like the heavy use of
<param></param>, which given we know what's coming is a parameter
doesn't add any information for us.

Third, because once you strip HTTP-POST off XML-RPC, you've got to
play with the XML parser direct anyway.  By that point, the difference
is minimal.

Essentially, if we were using XML-RPC (or SOAP), the tie-together
between request and response is based on the http connection.  Moving
to BXXP means you've got to alter the tags slightly to include a
"request ID" as well - at which point, we diverged.  It'd probably
make sense to bring it back into line with XML-RPC, I agree - but that
would essentially involve making the markup more verbose for the
dubious gain of looking like xml-rpc, while not actually _being_
xml-rpc.  Given we've already got the standard-ness of being
easily-parsed XML, making it "almost-xml-rpc" wouldn't buy us much.

SOAP, I'm assuming the same arguments hold for, plus it's more
overblown ;) I need to look more into that...

I've just stepped through the XML-RPC spec as per
http://www.xmlrpc.com/spec/ and added notes to our wiki page on the
translation between them.

KevinL

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