[Ietf-not43] XML-RPC for an information service?

[Andrew Newton]

Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> 
>>What about other generic RPC mechanisms such as SOAP and/or CORBA/IIOP?
> 
> SOAP : still a moving target, quite complicated partly because of
> featurism, interoperability problems.

Actually, I disagree with this.  There are many, many pieces of software 
that can use SOAP.  Perhaps a good comparison between the XML-RPC and 
SOAP would be good.  I think I would be more supportive of a SOAP standard.

> Corba : not really in the same category. But I would say that it is
> overkill when you have only two partners (a client and a server, like
> in IR protocols).

What!? I disagree with this, but considering nobody is considering 
specifying this via CORBA, let's drop this subject.


However, I do think there is a significant difference between something 
like IRIS (and also EPP) and just using a generic RPC mechanism like 
XML-RPC, SOAP, CORBA, DCE, etc...  IRIS defines ways of talking about 
different registry types, not just different registry instances.  This 
can be modeled within SOAP or whatever, but the use of a generic RPC 
mechanism gives you enough rope to hang yourself.  It also does not 
allow the finer grain of control that is sometimes desirable.  And in 
this instance, it can easily slide into functions clearly outside the 
charter of this group, such as registryDomain( domainName ).

As for the speed it takes to implement a client that can simply query a 
server for domain information, I think the LDAP-WHOIS proposal has this 
pretty much zipped up.  It can be done in about 5 seconds using the 
'ldapsearch' command.

-andy