Wednesday, 02/26/03

Brent Simmons is reimplementing the XML-RPC stack in Mac OS X. Simmons, of course, is the author of NetNewsWire and while at Userland was the guy responsible for getting Radio operational on the Mac; his XML-RPC bona fides are all in order.

My own work with Apple's web services widgetry is limited to a tiny tool I use to download and review the decisions made by my server-side spam filter. It's trivially simple, and that's what's so bloody wonderful about web services: the easy things are easy and the hard things are possible. But I haven't undertaken any hard things with these tools, and in anticipation of doing so eventually, I'm grateful for the adventures of folks like Simmons, who act as the canaries in my coalmine.

With Simmons abandoning the OS' XML-RPC tools, the canary is effectively dead. The Web Services APIs introduced in 10.2 hasn't yet set the world on fire. Of course, they're only deployable on 10.2, though if you're comfortable targeting only OS X, targeting only 10.2 and up is becoming less of a stretch. It probably doesn't help that the APIs are firmly rooted in Carbon and CoreFoundation, and thus shunned by so many cootie-phobic Cocoa programmers. The question I've not yet had occasion to ask myself is whether the hard things are actually less possible than they ought to be.

Simmons talks about some problems that are clearly bugs, and need fixing: repeatable crashers in such high-profile software that have survived since July 2002 brings to mind the AppleScript 1.8.3 debacle, a six-month period in which Script Debugger couldn't launch without its users first being forced to download an AppleScript beta. That said, I'm more concerned about flaws in XML-RPC that may have more staying power than clear-cut bugs, like insisting on ASCII when the rest of the OS, and the world, is galumphing toward Unicode.

My point is this poses a problem for OS X's web services hackers. I have a lot to learn at this point, and I'm sort of playing catch-up. Got any insight? Please send me a note.

[The original version of this entry, written when I was in more dire need of a nap and/or a sandwich, bizarrely painted the subject as a bone of contention between Simmons and Steve Zellers. This was not rational; I apologize to both.] 01:05PM «

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