I just noticed that the London Perl Mongers review the XML-RPC book. Thanks to Dean Wilson for a pretty balanced review.
As the author of the ASP/COM section, I'd like to take a minute to answer a valid criticisim of that chapter that Wilson raises:
My only disappointment with this chapter is that it relegates the mention of the COM based XML-RPC library to two paragraphs tucked away at the end of the chapter and does no more than acknowledge its existence and provide a link. Adding another small section covering its use with something like Visual Basic would have been a welcome addition.
At the time of that book's writing, the COM XML-RPC library looked moldy and forgotten. I was none too keen to drive people to use it. I don't have Visual Studio, so I couldn't really experiment with that library anyway (which would have required a C++ compiler, I believe). When the next edition of the book comes out, I'll see if we can't flesh out that chapter a bit more with more Windows Tech (eek!).
Wilson also pointed out that I mixed a fair amount of Perl into that chapter. I had two reasons for doing so. The first reason was didactic: I wanted to stress the language independence of the protocol. I would have like to have seen more of that in the book, actually. The second reason is that I wanted to reach out to Unix bigots like myself who might see XML-RPC as a way to control Winders boxen without haven't to do much programming on them. XML-RPC has the potential to create easy remote admin tools -- very useful for controlling point'n'click environments from a remote unix shell. ;-)
Thanks again to Dean Wilson for taking the time to review the book.
Oh, and I highly recommend giving Visual Perl a shot (from activestate.com) if you're willing to give it a try. It's pretty sweet.
Gimme a holler at djberg96@attbi.com if you're interested.
Re:Visual Studio
pudge on 2002-03-22T16:38:13
Three *giga*bytes??Re:Visual Studio
djberg96 on 2002-03-22T19:40:28
Yes, you heard correctly - 3 GB. I couldn't tell you everything that came with it. All I really wanted was Visual Studio so I could play with Visual Perl. It really is sweet. I ain't shelling out the bucks for it, though. Besides, I do most of my work in Unix.
