Script to ping Technocrati

Getting your blog listed on technocrati may be a good way to increase traffic to ur site. I have written a Python script to ping technocrati with your blog details. Here is a link to the script. The script could be quite useful to automatically ping Technocrati for all your blogs using a cron job.

Python rocks :)

Comparison of REST Vs XML-RPC

Some background of the protocols

Rest protocol uses the HTTP GET and HTTP PUT methods to communicate with an application server. For example an API for a typical application would look like

http://example.com/users/
http://example.com/users/{user} (one for each user)
http://example.com/findUserForm
http://example.com/locations/
http://example.com/locations/{location} (one for each location)
http://example.com/findLocationForm

The client typically a webbrowser needs to construct HTTP requests and parse XML or HTML responses.

XML-RPC uses XML protocol to make Remote procedure calls to execute functions defined on objects, over the network.

An RPC application might define operations such as the following:

getUser()
addUser()
removeUser()
updateUser()
getLocation()
addLocation()
removeLocation()
updateLocation()
listUsers()
listLocations()
findLocation()
findUser()

The client needs to construct an XML request and parse the XML response.

Comparison

REST is an HTTP based protocol. Whereas XML-RPC is XML based.
IMO, REST being an HTTP based protocol works best when the client is a browser. XML-RPC on the other hand is XML based. So no assumption is made about the client which is going to use the protocol.
When the client is a browser, more efforts need to be put in by the client to use XML-RPC than to use REST.

An advantage of REST over XML-RPC is that each object has its own URL and can easily be cached, copied, and bookmarked.

Advantage of XML-RPC is that it is client independant. Any sort of client be it a desktop application a mobile application, a mashup using information from your site can easily integrate with XML-RPC.

Overall I think REST has its advantages in the browser world. But as more and more applications are using the web as a platform and accessing it through a variety of methods other than web browsers XML-RPC has and edge over REST.

Conclusion

Web services should provide and XML based interface like XML-RPC. The could also provide a RESTful interface built on top of XML-RPC to support browser based clients.

My view of Gandhigiri

Gandhigiri is not about not hurting anyone, its not all about putting your other cheek forward after being hit on one cheek.

It is about getting your way by causing mental pain to your opponent as opposed to physical pain.

Niharika

Niharika 20/10/06