XML-RPC Client for ActionScript

1. Introduction
2. Class Design
3. Requirements
4. Using the Client
5. Examples
6. History
7. Feedback
8. License
9. API Reference

Introduction

Current version: .3.1 beta

As you likely know if you are interested enough in these classes to download them, XML-RPC is a simple, cross-platform mechanism for invoking remote methods. For ActionScript developers, it can provide an easy alternative approach to client-server communication. XML-RPC is somewhat comparable to SOAP web services but simpler in its implementation and in some ways more limited in the breadth of its functionality (i.e. it doesn’t have the same discovery and description capabilities available in SOAP, but it doesn’t have the overhead from them either!).

This class library is an XML-RPC client implementation for ActionScript 2.0. You can use it in your code to call remote XML-RPC methods provided by any XML-RPC server implementation.

So in summary, XML-RPC is a fairly common, fairly simple way to expose methods to be called remote over http without extra complications or overhead. The XML-RPC standard, as well as lists of implementations and resources, are maintained at http://www.xmlrpc.com/.

Acknowledgements

The code was written entirely by me (at least so far), but these sources gave me valuable insights in designing this library:

• The XML-RPC specification.
• Charles Cook’s XML-RPC implementation for C#.
• The Macromedia Flash Remoting for Flash MX 2004 ActionScript 2.0 components source code.
• Patrick O’Lone’s XMLRPC Client for Flash ActionScript 2.0 SourceForge project, in particular the alternative parsing algorithm recommended by an anonymous poster in the discussion forum. Ultimately I rolled my own parsing algorithm, but this suggestion gave me plenty of inspiration for how to improve parsing performance.