Sub Ubi

I’ve rewritten my XML-RPC library for Scheme; it was showing it’s age. More importantly, it had two big problems:

• A hand-rolled parser, and
• It did it’s own TCP/IP work

There are lots of other issues (documentation, robustness in the face of errors, etc.) which I’ll address with this rewrite as well. It looks like I just cut the code size by a factor of four (700+ lines down to around 180). The new version uses the SSAX parser for handling XML, and SXPath queries for grabbing elements out of the XML trees. And, most amazingly, it came together in … what, two hours? Three?

This came up because my original version wouldn’t sit behind Apache and serve XML-RPC requests; it was custom-tailored to run as a servlet under the PLT Scheme webserver. At this exact moment, however, I’d like to be able to code up an XML-RPC endpoint that Apache can serve for me. The rewrite makes it possible to drop a Scheme CGI in place that can serve XML-RPC requests from either Apache (or any “standard” CGI context) or the PLT server; looks like just a few characters difference for a programmer to move their code between the two.

Yes, Noel, I promise, I’ll upload this to Schematics. Really. I wasn’t too proud of this code before; this will be something worth maintaining. Well, something I’ll keep using, anyway.