Simon Willison’s Weblog

Why JSON isn’t just for JavaScript

Dave Winer’s discovery of JSON (and shock that “it’s not even XML”) has triggered an interesting discussion thread, on his blog and elsewhere. Plenty of people have re-assured him (and themselves) that it’s only used for JavaScript—it’s convenient in the browser but irrelevant elsewhere.

Testing a new version of IXR

Almost two years to the day since the last release, I’ve put together a new version of IXR, my PHP XML-RPC library. I haven’t published it on the site just yet as I want to make sure any bugs are ironed out first, but you can grab a copy here:

IXR 2.0

Harry Fuecks has been hacking on my XML-RPC library, and has released a new version with some significant changes. His article on phpPatterns describes the changes and provides a link to download the updated code. He’s made a bunch of interesting architectural changes which take advantage of a number of useful PEAR classes, including HTTP_Request which provides support for proxies and authentication, two frequently requested features.

Unstructured linkage

• Tom Gilder: Absolutely fucking nuts
• Get ready for IE changes
• Score Higher in Google Search Engine (and why Google is saving the web)
• High performance XML-RPC
• Juggling with packets: floating data storage (via Ned)
• Taking the Pulse of XML Editing
• Beware the dangers of generic Exceptions
• Blogging for Dollars
• Resign Patterns: Ailments of Unsuitable Project-Disoriented Software
• PatchDayReview.com—Explaining Microsoft’s Weekly Patches in Non-Technical Terms
• XML Application Objects (via the SitePoint Forums)
• Chapter 17 of the XML Bible: XSL Transformations
• Radiohead, as drawn by 5th graders
• Telephone Preference Service, the UK Do Not Call list

Minor bug fix in IXR

I’ve fixed a small but vital bug in the Incutio XML-RPC library. The library was causing errors when certain unicode characters were used in strings. This is because I was using PHP’s htmlentities() function to encode strings before transmission. This escapes all of the characters that need escaping (<, >, &, " and ’) but also escapes a number of other characters that have an HTML entity equivalent. The problem is that these additional entities are defined in HTML but not in XML, so XML parsers were choking on them when they tried to parse the resulting message. I’ve fixed the bug now by switching to using htmlspecialchars() instead. Thanks to the several people who reported this one (it took me a while to figure out) and to Marc Logemann who’s blog entry finally helped me crack it.

XML-RPC Errata

Fredrik Lundh: Unofficial XML-RPC Errata, a work in progress. It’s good to see that the unicode limitation has finally been cleaned up. What would be really useful is if someone could work out a list of all of the older implementations that only support ASCII strings.

Pingback redux

I think I’ve worked out a way of implementing Pingback (or a Pingback-like system) without any need for XML-RPC, <link> elements or custom HTTP headers.

IXR forum

The Incutio XML-RPC Library for PHP (IXR to its friends) now has a forum. The forum is powered by incForum, Incutio’s very own forum software written by my colleague Tim.

Two new web services

I’ve implemented two example web services to demonstrate the Incutio PHP XML-RPC library’s capabilities. The services allow you to search and retrieve articles from FOLDOC and the Jargon File, two popular freely available online dictionaries.

New version of IXR

Announcing beta 1.5 of IXR, the Incutio XML-PRC Library for PHP. The library has undergone a complete restructuring and has a much cleaner design as a result. It also has a huge stack of new features, including:

New IXR soon

I was up most of the night working on a new version of my XML-RPC library (newly named IXR, for Incutio XML-RPC). I should have it ready for release some time today—it implements most of the extensions I’ve linked to over the past few days and has a much cleaner object structure than the first version, while maintaining the ability to implement a server or client in as little code as possible.

Even more XML-RPC

Yet more XML-RPC specs (thanks HarryF):

The missing docs

Yet more XML-RPC goodness. The documentation for the suggested introspection methods throws a 404, but Google’s cache doesn’t:

Feedback

HarryF provided some excellent feedback on my library:

And then there were eight

According to XML-RPC.com’s Implementations page there are now 8 PHP implementations of XML-RPC! Looks like I wasn’t the only person with an itch to scratch :)

Useful XML-RPC links

Some useful XML-RPC links (before I forget):

More on Pingback

More on PingBack. PingBack can be seen in effect on this blog and in this entry on kryogenix.org. If you wish to ping my blog you can do so using the following XML-RPC details:

Pingback implemented

I’ve implemented PingBack on my blog. PingBack is a system for tracking who is linking to your blog in a controlled way, based on a post by Stuart a few months ago. The idea is that when you link to a PingBack enabled blog you (or your blogging tool) should send an XML-RPC “ping” to that blog’s PingBack server telling it where you have linked to and where you linked from. The PingBack server can then grab your page, check that the link is there and extract a title and short description from the blog. The system is an alternative to (and was inspired by) MoveableType’s TrackBack feature. Stuart and I are actively developing the idea and will be releasing code and documentation to help other people experiment with the system in the near future.

A new XML-RPC library for PHP

I spent most of yesterday messing around with XML-RPC. There are a variety of XMl-RPC libraries available for PHP but none of them felt right for what I needed. So, I’ve written my own.

PHP XML-RPC

I’ve been playing with XML-RPC and PHP today. I ended up using Keith Devin’s pleasantly straight forward library thanks to PHP’s built in (and completely undocumented) XML-RPC support conflicting with the function names used by Useful Inc’s partially object oriented library. I’ve been messing around with Stuart’s idea for a trackback alternative and things are looking pretty promising.

Instant PHP Web Services

XML-RPC Class Server is a really clever piece of code. It consists of a single file which you can drop in a directory full of PHP .class.php files to instantly provide an XML-RPC interface to every class in the directory. Private methods that begin with an underscore are not included in the web service. Unfortunately the system requires PHP’s XML-RPC extensions to be enabled.

XML fun

Peter has upgraded his blog to the latest version of Moveable Type. As a result, his blog now pings weblogs.com via XML-RPC whenever he makes an update. blo.gs grabs the weblogs.com changes.xml file once an hour and uses it to generate a smaller file listing only sites on my blogroll. My site then grabs my personal favorites.xml file once an hour and uses it to render my blogroll ordered by the time each blog was updated.

XML-RPC debugging

Via techno weenie: A Python XML-RPC debugging proxy script. This solves the problem of XML-RPC errors from PHP being sent out with the XML-RPC response packet and breaking any XML parser trying to recieve the packet. Instead you can test your script by aiming at the proxy script which will dump any problems to the console for you.