NAME

SYNOPSIS

 use Frontier::Responder; 
 my $res = Frontier::Responder->new( methods => {
                                                 add => sub{ $_[0] + $_[1] },
                                                 cat => sub{ $_[0] . $_[1] },
                                                },
                                    );
 print $res->answer;

DESCRIPTION

For those new to XML-RPC, here is a brief description of this protocol. XML-RPC is a way to execute functions on a different machine. Both the client's request and listeners response are wrapped up in XML and sent over HTTP. Because the XML-RPC conversation is in XML, the implementation languages of the server (here called a listener), and the client can be different. This can be a powerful and simple way to have very different platforms work together without acrimony. Implicit in the use of XML-RPC is a contract or API that an XML-RPC listener implements and an XML-RPC client calls. The API needs to list not only the various procedures that can be called, but also the XML-RPC datatypes expected for input and output. Remember that although Perl is permissive about datatyping, other languages are not. Unforuntately, the XML-RPC spec doesn't say how to document the API. It is recomended that the author of a Perl XML-RPC listener should at least use POD to explain the API. This allows for the programmatic generation of a clean web page.

METHODS

new( OPTIONS )

This is the class constructor. As is traditional, it returns a blessed reference to a Frontier::Responder object. It expects arguments to be given like a hash (Perl's named parameter mechanism). To be effective, populate the "methods" parameter with a hashref that has API procedure names as keys and subroutine references as values. See the SYNOPSIS for a sample usage.

answer()

In order to parse the request and execute the procedure, this method must be called. It returns a XML string that contains the procedure's response. In a typical CGI program, this string will simply be printed to STDOUT.

SEE ALSO

<http://www.scripting.com/frontier5/xml/code/rpc.html>

AUTHOR

Joe Johnston <jjohn@cs.umb.edu> wrote an adaptation of the Frontier::Daemon class to create this CGI XML-RPC listener class.