Chapter 12. SOAP and XML-RPC

By now, we have learned about invoking commands remotely in Tcl. We have used the comm package, deployed debugger remotely, connected using TclDevKit Inspector, and provided other interfaces with which to run Tcl commands. While all these solutions have their uses, their disadvantage is that they are limited to the Tcl language only.

Often, we need our applications to talk to or export services to other parts of our company's IT infrastructure. The problem, that applications written in different languages need to be able to communicate with each other, has been known for a long time. Fortunately, there are standards that describe how to export methods in a cross-language manner. In this chapter, we'll learn about two of them which are in common use.

We'll start by learning about XML-RPC, which is a protocol for invoking remote methods based on XML and HTTP. This protocol defines how sending simple and complex data types can be done, as well as sending single items...