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JSON RPC is looking for a new maintainer

json-rpc.org

8 pointsbenatkin6 comments

I'm interested to see what someone could do with this, if they pushed the idea a little harder. I'm also just curious what people who've used JSON for REST services a lot think of this. Is it just a fancy way of describing what people are already doing with JSON? Or is there real value in this standard for making communication with JSON over a network easier?

Is json-rpc considered RESTful? At first glance it seems like no, since it encodes the method within the request body instead of using HTTP methods.

Anything that includes the three letters "RPC" is not inherently not RESTful.

This is because you are making Calls to Remote Procedures rather than Transferring States of REpresentations [of resources].

I, of course, rearranged the acronyms RPC and REST for the sake of English.

Random question, which isn't clear from the spec: can arguments be arbitrarily "deep" JSON objects (i.e. arrays and objects) or are they limited to primitives (strings, numbers, booleans, null)?

(obviously you could just pass a JSON serialized string, but that's not what I'm asking)

They can be arbitrarily deep. Otherwise they couldn't claim to be supporting JSON objects as parameters.

Of course, anyone could just do a REST request using a wrapper object with the name of the procedure and an id. Then you'd have implemented a JSON-based RPC mechanism yourself! So it's pretty trivial. This mainly exists to get the idea out and implementations in various scripting languages, methinks.

One thing that might be cool: Perhaps an URL could map to an object, and making an rpc call on that URL could call a function on that object.

"Perhaps an URL could map to an object, and making an rpc call on that URL could call a function on that object."

That seems to be what this article is advocating: http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2009/01/29/some-rpc-with-your-js...

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