Finally got some XML sources to talk XMLRPC to each other. As I mentioned on a prior occassion, this is distributed computing made easy. So why did this take so much time? It's software. Software is not easy. Software communication is even harder. First you need two different systems that even have the ability to converse with each other. Then you need to get them talking the same language. What is system A expecting to hear? What is system B saying? Now reverse the roles and try again. Analyze every byte of every conversation to find the source of the failure to communicate seemlessly. Finally found it. Was sending RSS items to one server, who only wanted  the elements of the item, not the items themselves. Grrr. Then the XML generator was double escaping  XML entities.  Fixed that. Then all of a sudden it started working. Great. I can edit my weblog and have it propogate to any place on the web that I might wish to have a weblog. That's what's cool about XMLRPC. And it's only the beginning. The proof of concept has been around for a few years now. But folks like me are just starting to actually use it. And the API's are still primitive. Let's take the weblog example. If I decide to update 20 weblogs from one page - I have to keep track of

• where each weblog resides
• my login credentials for each weblog
• the unique name of the weblog that I wish to edit
• for every message : the message-ID of that message for that server
• the category list for every server
• yada, yada

It's too much data to have to enter and keep track of. That's why using XMLRPC as a weblog tool won't survive except on systems with huge databases or as a remote data entry tool for one blog. But that's where XMLRPC came from. Proof of concept but less than a must have. It isn't where XMLRPC is going. It's a must have, but only after we get the infrastructure in place.