Friday, August 31, 2001

03:43h

  TEST:

Could someone with IE on the mac (or *nix :)) at least a non-windows platform go to this test page. I need to know if the new gzip feature also works in IE on those platforms (it might not!) Please drop me a line with the browser version and the OS you are using and the result text (both if it failed or succeeded)!

Thanks

Ruben

00:41h

  NEW RELEASE Version 0.92

Thomas had a fantastic idea while struggling with the meerkat service. It sent a response of 64k. This took a long time to download 8-10 seconds (and he has a 2Mb connection). He found out that both IE and Mozilla support XML streams that are gzip-encoded. So now we have a new version of rpcroute.cgi, renamed to rpcproxy which automatically gzips the response of messages larger then 1k. The 64k meerkat response was reduced to 5k! The new version can be found on the download page.

Thursday, August 30, 2001

20:28h

  UPDATE Version 0.91b

Thomas found a small error in rcprout.cgi

------ MESSAGE from THOMAS -------

Ok, you are never too old to learn something new. For 5 hrs now,
I have been struggling with the weirdest thing this year.
MSIE totally refused to parse the response from 'meerkat.getChannels'
while it ran fine in Moz. The only different from this method from the
other meerkat stuff (which btw runs flawlessly in MSIE) is that it spits
out a 65 KB XML stream. Quite large. MSIE continuously kept
giving me an empty xml-doc.

MSIE was telling me there were unclosed tags inthere, but the fact it
ran fine in Moz made me totally confused, cuz Mozilla is usually a
lot more pickier about these things.

This led me to believe that it had something to do with asynchronity in
the msxml parser while populating 'responseXML' eventhough
running with async set to false. Figured my RPCClient continued executing
before the document had been fully parsed. Spent two hours with that
just to conclude this was definitely not the case. :(

Then I realised that when I didnt' route the request thru rpcroute,
but sent it straight on, suddenly everything went fine. huh! How could that be...

Just for fun, I then swithed the STDOUT mode in rpcroute to BINARY
...and suddenly MSIE's XML-parser loves the response. :)

I think this is only an issue when rpcroute.cgi runs on a Win32 box and
routes large XML-streams coming in from a rpc-server hosted on a
*NIX/Linux environment.

Anyway, I just released version 1.31 of rpcproute that will simply
switch STDOUT to binary mode if running under Win32 automatically.

{ binmode STDOUT if $^O =~ /Win32/i; }

02:01h

  BTW: I have put the PHP xml-rpc server i use on the download page. I hacked it a bit to support system.multicall. But use only at your own risk!

00:23h

  NEW RELEASE Version 0.91

Ok i know, it's 23 minutes late, but it is fantastic. Check the new example it is now possible to make more than one calls per request (if the service supports this).

Also IE5 now can do aSync transfers! So IE won't stop propegation during transfer, wich is very usefull when you wan't to display a progress indicator of somesort.

Modules are coming soon!

Wednesday, August 29, 2001

09:42h

  Hi All. Just to let you know, version 0.91 is coming before the end of the day. Lots of mayor changes, bugfixes etc. It will contain:

- Modules support (at least 2 modules will be ready also)
- system.multicall support as described here
- Improved API
- lots of (small) bugs fixed.

Around the same time some new examples will also be posted!

STAY TUNED!!! :-)

Tuesday, August 28, 2001

09:10h

  Alright! Had some problems with HTML tags and sending them to the blogger services but this has been solved by encapsulating the string in a CDATA section! I am soooo happy. version 0.86 now at the download page

04:52h

  Version 0.85 is released. Several updates and bug fixes. One mayor that caused IE to crash while on a trusted site. vcXMLRPC is heavily tested on the XML-RPC server of www.blogger.com. Go see the example to amaze yourself by the speeds client-side xml-rpc has in store for you.

Monday, August 27, 2001

22:29h

  Ok Thomas was thinking about security and realized that the rpcroute.cgi script possibly can be used for "really bad stuff" So now we have vcXMLRPC version 0.81b. It is on the download page:

---------------- FROM THOMAS ----------------------------

just realized that rpcroute could be used as a proxy for really bad stuff
by an unauthorized user, so I've built in a limitation for what urls that
can be proxied. as of now, the requested remote rpc-service URLs
must be present in the list of allowed_services.

these are hardcoded by default :

my @allowed_services = (
   "http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/xml-rpc/server.php",
   "http://www.stuffeddog.com/speller/speller-rpc.cgi",
   "http://plant.blogger.com/api/RPC2",
   # ...additional services here...
);

----------------------------------------------------------------------

15:15h

  Started using the service of blogger.com today for this site. Too bad you can't use it with messages in the past. The old messages are placed below for back referencing. Yesterday 80 Hits, today 29. Hope to solve the last problems with vcXMLRPC and release version 1.00 soon! 0 known webapps using vcXMLRPC (after 3 days :-) ).

August 27 03.30h

vcXMLRPC 0.81 released. See the changelog for more information. the routing file is also updated. Go to the download page to download the new zip file.

August 26 17.00h

99 Hits Yesterday! Coming from 2 Hits the day before that's a BIG increase. Today already 55 Hits. I Hope this library will result in some nice web-applications. If you implemented the library, or changed it in any way; LET ME KNOW!. Version 0.81 coming soon with some improved functionality.

I updated the website, but there is still some work that needs to be done. The reference guide will be up and running monday(27th) evening.

August 26 01.44h

This site was posted on www.scripting.com
This XML-RPC implementation was placed on the official implementations list

August 25 17.00h

ROUTING

There has been some confusion about the routing feature of this library. Let me explain. MSIE and Mozilla have an http communication object called XMLHttpRequest. With this object a custom HTTP Message can be send to a server. Both browsers limit the server to wich a message can be send to the domain on which the file resides that wants to send the message. Therefore other XMLRPC services cannot receive message from that page. To fix this problem we supply a perl file which receives the XMLRPC Message send by the client-browser and routes it through the service on another domain. This however isn't always necessary. In IE it is possible to add a server to the trusted sites section and then no routing is necessary to talk to other domains. In mozilla this isn't possible. Only when you send a message to your own domain routing isn't required.

I hope this makes it clear. Else mail me.

August 25 15.30h

This is the website for the vcXMLRPC library current version 0.80.
A Library written in pure javascript for browsers.
No CGI is used. No Server-side scripting required!
(A Perl script for routing is available but optional)

The library currently supports Mozilla and Internet Explorer, Base64 decoding and Routing, for more information see the documentation and the changelog. There are some examples available but everything on this site is under construction.

This library is written by Virtual Cowboys, a dutch company. It is written by Ruben Daniels. Some features are build with the help of Thomas from Saltstorm