[Zope-dev] XML-RPC "To Do" List

Eric Kidd eric@userland.com
Mon, 26 Jul 1999 14:28:14 -0400


Since Zope is heading towards a 2.0 release, I want to clean up some of the
niggling problems with Zope XML-RPC. Here are the problems I know about:

 1) There are known bugs in xmlrpclib 0.9.5. This needs to be upgraded to
    version 0.9.8, or XML-RPC calls using the <struct> tag will fail in a
    variety of interesting ways.
 2) Zope XML-RPC methods cannot return 0, '', or other values which Python
    considers to be false. These values get mangled somewhere between the
    External Method and ZPublisher/xmlrpc.py.
 3) Either Digital Creations or UserLand needs to write up a page on Zope
    XML-RPC. We'll point to it from www.xmlrpc.com.
 4) Logging and error reporting still leave a lot to be desired. I'm
    working on this.

And one minor issue:

 5) Zope XML-RPC does not use the Expat parser shipped with Zope 2.0b1. It
    uses the slower and less correct xmllib parser included with Python by
    default. It should be possible to hook xmlrpclib up to Expat, provided
    that all the various modules involved use the standard Python XML APIs.

I can handle (4) myself, and I'll handle (5) when it becomes a critical
issue for one of our projects. (1) is easy--I can mail somebody the correct
file. I can handle (3), or somebody at DC can handle it if they prefer.

But one of these problems is tricky: (2). Zope may have good reasons for
throwing away false values, and I don't want to hack on this code until I
know what the issues are.

Cheers,
Eric