New version of XML-RPC Library Released!

XML-RPC is a spec that allows software running on different operating systems to make remote procedure calls over the internet using XML over HTTP. It was inspired by a more simplistic RPC protocol and an early draft of the SOAP protocol. xml-rpc-c is one such implementation of XML-RPC.

I used this library in the past for multiple reasons. First, I needed to (essentially) perform a remote procedure call. Secondly, I needed it to be cross platform (*nix and Windows). Third was the library must not run under some compatibility layer for Windows such as MinGW or CygWin (too many headaches in the past for my taste). On the wishlist was a single library that can be used on both platforms so I could concentrate on core application functionality and not worry about writing interface classes to several different implementations of a protocol. At the time, SOAP was out, and this library was in.

Granted, there was a bit of work needed on the Windows side. I wanted to use the WinInet API's so I wouldn't have to deal with configuring proxy settings in my application - if IE worked, I wanted my app to work, too. WinInet support wasn't working out of the box - in fact the original maintainer sort of dropped out of sight. Thanks to the community at the time (especially Alex), I was able to share a few patches and get it working.

When I saw that Bryan Henderson had taken over the library as the official admin and began active development, I saw it as an opportunity to contribute something back to the community. I suppose my role is maintainer of all things Windows-related.

The latest release features a new possibility for Windows users. I created an XML-RPC server using the http.sys dll shipped with Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP SP2. Applications using this dll can share the same port as other applications using this dll. Windows Server 2003's IIS 6 happens to use it, so you can even share port 80 and/or 443 with it seamlessly - no more ISAPI dll's to accomplish that feat!

For developers looking to use http.sys in your own code, as well as using it with SSL, this code may serve as an example for your own purposes - such as dealing with basic authentication or SSL connections which is not provided for in the http.sys API's or documentation. There is a dearth of example code out there for this particular API for some reason.

For making client-to-server calls on Windows, the only out-of-the-box solution was the WinInet transport. The problem with this API is it can't be used in a service. Although the xml-rpc-c library always supported using libcurl out of the box, the compilation and linking of this was difficult to figure out and required a few creative changes. With this release, I hope to have made it easier.

Finally, the last major change was tightening up the WinInet transport a bit. Previously, communication over SSL would succeed even if the server certificate was invalid. That functionality was great when developing using a test certificate, but probably not what you want to use in production. By default, the old behavior is now only active if set by a specific transport option at runtime.

If anyone is using this library, on Windows or otherwise, please feel free to give me a shout. If you have any feature requests, let me know. One note to downloaders - for some reason the tarball does not extract properly using WinRar. If you rename the download to have a .tgz extension and use WinZip to decompress it, you will be able to open the project files in Visual C++ 6 without problems. Visual Studio 2003 will also open, convert, and compile the project without problems.