What's Next? (Java & XML, 2nd Edition)

10.6. What's Next?

The next chapter looks at a technology that allows XML to be used as a data format in an important request and response model: XML Remote Procedure Calls. XML-RPC allows clients in a distributed system to request that tasks be executed on a server (or servers) on another portion of the network. Until recently, RPC has declined in popularity, mostly due to the surge of RMI-based technologies in the Java space (most notably, EJB). However, with XML as a data format, XML-RPC is a new solution for many problems that could not be solved cleanly or efficiently without RPC. I'll show you XML-RPC next, and in particular, the Java implementation of the technology.