A Framework For Transitioning Enterprise Web Services From XML-RPC to REST

Web Services are defined by the W3C as “a software system designed to support interoperable machine to machine interaction over a network". There are however, several alternatives as to how Web Services can be implemented: WS-* and Plain Old XML (POX) are popular approaches that markup their RPC (Remote Procedure Call) based payloads with eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Both approaches can use HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for transferring their messages. Representational State Transfer (REST) is an alternative approach that is gaining in popularity. This research-in-progress paper presents the issues of XML-RPC based Web Services (XML verbosity and message opacity) and why a RESTful approach solves these issues. We present results which show the improved performance. We present a framework that outlines a translation from XML-RPC to RESTful format for “read” style request messages. This framework is ideally suited to enable enterprises to gradually transition from XML-RPC to RESTful Web Services.