How XML-RPC started up

How XML-RPC started up

From Scripting News podcast by Dave Winer

January 17, 2026

About this episode

The episode discusses the creation of XML-RPC in 1998 and its relevance to current technology.

As with the previous podcast I asked Claude.ai to write the show notes. It makes mistakes, so you have to listen to the podcast if you want to know what I really think. This time it wrote it in the first person, not third person which I would have preferred. At the end I have some of my own notes. DW This story about XML-RPC's creation in 1998 feels relevant because we're on the verge of something similar today, but this time it might go much further. Frontier was a comprehensive scripting environment with object database, editor, debugger, and extensive verb set that provided one unified way to do things instead of JavaScript's fifty million ways. It had excellent networking capabilities and was deeply integrated for desktop publishing and magazine pre-production. Apple felt threatened and didn't appreciate what we were doing - there was a lot of bad stuff happening at Apple, and we were part of one of the bad things that happened there. We couldn't depend on the Mac anymore and had to convert to Windows. The core problem was communication between Mac and Windows systems with their completely incompatible networking. The solution hit me and I wrote a blog post called 'HTTP plus…

People in this episode

Host: Dave Winer

Topics covered

  • XML-RPC
  • technology history
  • scripting environments
  • networking
  • desktop publishing
  • communication

Keywords

  • XML-RPC
  • scripting
  • networking
  • Apple
  • Microsoft
  • Bill Gates
  • Frontier
  • HTTP
  • RPC

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Apple, Microsoft

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