Zend XmlRPC

Closing the tour of XML-RPC implementations usable with PHP-GTK, the shortest code to access our geo_nick service makes use a higher-level XML-RPC library: the Zend_XmlRpc_Client from the Zend Framework. Unlike earlier implementations, Zend Framework (ZF) includes both the mashalling/unmarshalling to/from XML line format and the HTTP request/reponse process, wrapped up in a class-based mechanism using exceptions to handle errors, both at the HTTP and XML service levels (not demonstrated here).

From its home page, XML-RPC is described as a "...remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding. XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and returned." The Zend Framework provides support for both consuming remote XML-RPC services and building new XML-RPC servers.

I've been working on Zend_XmlRpc_Server for some months now. In the past couple weeks, I've refactored it to push the class/function reflection into Zend_Server_Reflection, and, in doing so, noted that there were further areas for refactoring into additional helper classes. Currently, it now has classes for the Request, Response, and Faults, and all actual XML wrangling is done in those, making the server basically XML-agnostic.