“Today the growing popularity of the Internet and its inherent advantages have motivated developers and IT departments to migrate complex C/C++ business and scientific applications to a Web-based environment. XML-RPC is a perfect mechanism to integrate existing C/C++ programs with other client-side technologies. This article is a step-by-step guide to exposing C++ methods as services. It includes sample code snippets for C++ integration using an open source XML-RPC Library.”
Nice and that’s coming from someone who’s loathed RPC programming in several languages. Table 1 alone makes it more than a worthy read for people who never will.
and then demolish it afterwards!
The figure 1 shows various remoting methods for three languages, when for instance CORBA is available for all three. RMI over IIOP is also interoperable with CORBA (less object by value)
Complexity wise, SOAP is equivalent to CORBA.
The only advantage of SOAP/XML-RPC is that the remoting is somewhat more firewall friendly, due to the HTTP encapsulation.
I is also easier to version SOAP services than CORBA object.
The article is nevertheless good reading for getting an idea of what’s out there.
We considered XML-RPC for a scientific application a few years ago but found that it didn’t support numbers such as NAN or Inf, as a result we couldn’t use it. Hopefully this has changed by now.
Please, don’t let this be a trend with C++ development – the flood of XML that is so prevailant in J2EE and .Net development. Devs in those environments mostly detest having to type out so much XML.