Echo API draft 2 is out.
Some people have expressed concern about how difficult it will be to publish using straight XML, rather than an RPC wrapper like XML-RPC or SOAP. Here is a working example (in Python of course, although Mark Hershberger has a similar example in Perl) taken from Section 4.2: Creating a new entry:
from xmltramp import Element, parse
import urllib2
entry = Element('entry')
entry.title = 'My First Entry'
entry.subtitle = 'In which a newbie learns to blog...'
entry.summary = 'Very boring entry...'
entry.author = Element('name')
entry.author.name = 'Bob B. Bobbington'
entry.author.homepage = 'http://bob.name/'
entry.author.weblog = 'http://bob.info/'
entry.issued = '2003-07-07T23:50:00'
entry.content = parse('<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This is my full content entry. It <em>contains</em> inline XHTML markup.</div>')
entry.content('type', 'application/xhtml+xml')
entry.content('xml:lang', 'en')
print 'Sending...'
print
print entry.__repr__(1,1)
print
request = urllib2.Request('http://example.org/reilly',
entry.__repr__(1,1),
{"Content-Type":"application/not-echo+xml"})
reply = urllib2.urlopen(request)
print 'new entry is located at', reply.headers.dict['location']This prints the following:
Sending...
<entry>
<title>My First Entry</title>
<subtitle>In which a newbie learns to blog...</subtitle>
<summary>Very boring entry...</summary>
<author>
<name>Bob B. Bobbington</name>
<homepage>http://bob.name/</homepage>
<weblog>http://bob.info/</weblog>
</author>
<issued>2003-07-07T23:43:43</issued>
<content xml:lang='en' type="application/xhtml+xml">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This is my full content entry. It <em>contains</em> inline XHTML markup.</div>
</content>
</entry>
new entry is located at http://example.org/reilly/1As a comparison, here is what the same transaction might look like with an XML-RPC-based API. This is based on the prototype by Georg Bauer, who explains the mapping is as follows: an element with just text is just mapped to a simple string. An element with attributes and a string is mapped to a structure where the attributes start with _ and namespaces are noted as _namespace_attribute and the value itself is noted as value_. An element with subelements is mapped to a structure with the tags as structure elements. Multiple values are represented as arrays.
import xmlrpclib
entry = {}
entry['title'] = 'My First Entry'
entry['subtitle'] = 'In which a newbie learns to blog...'
entry['summary'] = 'Very boring entry...'
entry['author'] = {}
entry['author']['name'] = 'Bob B. Bobbington'
entry['author']['homepage'] = 'http://bob.name/'
entry['author']['weblog'] = 'http://bob.info/'
entry['issued'] = xmlrpclib.DateTime('2003-07-07T23:50:00')
entry['content'] = {}
entry['content']['value_'] = '<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This is my full content entry. It <em>contains</em> inline XHTML markup.</div>'
entry['content']['_type'] = 'application/xhtml+xml'
entry['content']['_xml_lang'] = 'en'
print 'Sending...'
print
# xmlrpclib will print serialization of request and reply when verbose=1
reply = xmlrpclib.Server('http://example.org/reilly/RPC2', verbose=1).newPost(entry)
print 'new entry is located at', reply['location']Which prints this…
<?xml version='1.0'?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>newPost</methodName>
<params>
<param>
<value>
<struct>
<member>
<name>content</name>
<value>
<struct>
<member>
<name>value_</name>
<value>
<string><div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This is my full content entry. It <em>contains</em> inline XHTML markup.</div></string>
</value>
</member>
<member>
<name>_type</name>
<value>
<string>application/xhtml+xml</string>
</value>
</member>
<member>
<name>_xml_lang</name>
<value>
<string>en</string>
</value>
</member>
</struct>
</value>
</member>
<member>
<name>subtitle</name>
<value>
<string>In which a newbie learns to blog...</string>
</value>
</member>
<member>
<name>author</name>
<value>
<struct>
<member>
<name>weblog</name>
<value>
<string>http://bob.info/</string>
</value>
</member>
<member>
<name>homepage</name>
<value>
<string>http://bob.name/</string>
</value>
</member>
<member>
<name>name</name>
<value>
<string>Bob B. Bobbington</string>
</value>
</member>
</struct>
</value>
</member>
<member>
<name>issued</name>
<value>
<dateTime.iso8601>2003-07-07T23:50:00</dateTime.iso8601>
</value>
</member>
<member>
<name>title</name>
<value>
<string>My First Entry</string>
</value>
</member>
<member>
<name>summary</name>
<value>
<string>Very boring entry...</string>
</value>
</member>
</struct>
</value>
</param>
</params>
</methodCall>
[ ... serialization of response omitted for brevity ... ]
new entry is located at http://example.org/reilly/1No comments; if you have something to say, say it on the wiki. XmlRpc, XmlRpcDiscussion, SampleXmlrpc, RestAndRpc.
Update: added required xml:lang attribute.
Update 2: removed extraneous print statement in XML-RPC example and added a comment to make it clear where the XML-RPC serialization comes from (xmlrpclib.py prints it when you specify verbose=1).
Update 3: linked to MAH’s Perl example.
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