3.1. History of XML-RPC

XML-RPC was designed primarily by Dave Winer of UserLand Software, Inc. He was one of the designers working on the SOAP specification and became frustrated with the mounting complexity. He wanted something to use immediately, but SOAP was taking a long time to coalesce. So he forked off what was then an early working draft of the SOAP protocol, and this became what is now known as XML-RPC.

The first implementation of the specification was in Userland's Frontier product, a content management system with scripting, object database, and server capabilities. This was introduced in April 1998, and eventually the specification was published to encourage the development of other compliant toolkits. Currently, there are 65 implementations in languages ranging from AppleScript to Zope. There are toolkits for Lisp, Ruby, Eiffel, Scheme, Dylan, and an impressive seven different implementations for PHP. Perl features three different implementations, which will be covered in-depth in Chapter 4.