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Hour 25. Creating Web Services with XML-RPC

Every day, thousands of computer programs join millions of people on the Web, gathering and exchanging information over HTTP, the protocol that drives the World Wide Web.

As humankind is reading the news, playing online games of Texas Hold 'em poker, and searching Google for the latest celebrity wardrobe malfunctions, our programs are diligently putting the Web to work, calling methods of other programs and receiving data in return.

These exchanges take place over the Internet, enabling two programs to work together as if they were both running on the same computer.

Programs that can do this are called web services, and during the 25th hour of the day, you'll learn how to code them in Java using the Apache XML-RPC class library.

By the way

As you might have noticed, there only have been 24 hours in a day since the ancient Babylonians set up the timekeeping scheme more than 1,000 years ago. Web services are such an important facet of programming we've suspended the laws of time and space to bring you this additional hour.


During this hour, you'll learn about the following aspects of web services programming and XML-RPC:

  • Exchanging information over HTTP with XML-RPC

  • Creating classes whose methods can be called with XML-RPC

  • Running an XML-RPC server

  • Calling a method with an XML-RPC client

  • Receiving a response from the method call

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