#Does marsedit use xmlrpc how to
#Does marsedit use xmlrpc code

You don’t have to write a new parser for each new API. When you learn a new API for in-computer procedure calls, you just learn the different names of the procedures and what parameters they take. It’s an XML formatting of various data types.) Though XML-RPC’s format isn’t the same, it’s the same in spirit. (OS X programmers: think of property lists. So programmers continue to think not only in terms of procedures but in terms of the data types they already know.

#Does marsedit use xmlrpc code

In other words, my code might send a Cocoa string and the server gets a Python string. What XML-RPC does is give you an easy way to call procedures and translate your data to a format that other languages can use. Sometimes they go by different names-XML-RPC uses the word “struct” instead of “dictionary”-but they’re the same types. It turns out-no surprise-that languages have common types of data: integers, strings, arrays, dictionaries, and so on. (Which is exactly what ecto and MarsEdit do.)Įven though your code may or may not look like the example someProcedure (thing, otherThing, somethingElse), you’re still thinking in terms of procedure calls, which is very natural for programmers. You could do things like call a procedure on your weblog server that posts a new entry to your weblog. That would open up a whole new world of programming. The caller and the procedure are on the same machine.īut wouldn’t it be cool if the procedures didn’t have to be on the same machine? Wouldn’t it be cool if they worked across the internet? Or they call procedures in a library (in my case, I use Cocoa, so there are lots of Cocoa-supplied methods my code calls). Normally, of course, they write code that calls a procedure that they wrote-it’s part of the same program. (Maybe it’s the sum of the things, or true or false, or an error code, and so on.) There’s often a return value that lets you know the result. Maybe it stores things, maybe it converts them to something else, maybe it sends them somewhere else, maybe it adds them together. In other words, you call a procedure (or method or function) with some parameters. When you write software, you write lots of code that looks like this: someProcedure (thing, otherThing, somethingElse). So my point here isn’t to convince anyone to use XML-RPC but to talk about why it’s good. Even if we use other things, it’s worth remembering the virtues of XML-RPC, since nothing else comes close yet in terms of both ease-of-use and generality. (I argued in favor of XML-RPC-months ago? A year ago? And lost.)īut now and again I feel the need to explain why XML-RPC is good, since the issue will come up in other contexts. It’s way too late to convince the folks working on the Atom weblog editing API that XML-RPC is good. Going back to the screen shotâ€”you can see it, a direct line between the spec and its expression in object-oriented code. Though an object-oriented language isn’t required to parse Atom feeds, the Atom spec is a case of object-oriented thinking applied to feed formats, which is cool.

#Does marsedit use xmlrpc how to

What I like about this is that it practically tells you how to write an Atom feed parser: it suggests breaking up your code into a collection of small classes for each of the different constructs. (The Content construct is probably the most complex, but you only need to do it once, and then you can handle titles, summaries, and content elements.) There are other constructs too, for content, dates, and links. You might have a whole bunch of Person constructs in a single feedâ€”but, each time a person is identified, it’s done the same way. Wherever a person is identified in an Atom feed, it uses a Person construct. If you’re using an object-oriented language (such as Objective-C, Python, and C++) you can map these constructs to classes.įor example, a Person construct has three pieces of information: name, URL, and email address. (Note to people who don’t program in Cocoa: the â€œRSâ€ prefix is there because, in Cocoa, you typically prefix your class names with some initialsâ€”your own, your company’s, or the name of the project.)Ītom is more complex than RSS, yesâ€”but, at the same time, the Atom folks did a cool thing that mitigates this complexity: they defined certain â€œconstructsâ€ that are re-used in different places. What you’re looking at is part of the Atom spec (leftmost), then part of the list of files of my XML-related classes, then the interface for a class named RSAtomPerson. (If you’ve written an RSS parser but haven’t done Atom yet, you might find this interesting.) This screen shot illustrates something very cool about the Atom feed format.