> You're not comparing SOAP/XML to REBOL though, are you? That wouldn't > seem to be a fruitful exercise. One is a protocol and > meta-markup-language, and the other is a programming language. They're > both good at what they do.
XML and the XML-related standards are basically a set of representational constraints, as is every language. REBOL, when used purely as data representation language (i.e. without any of its non-declarative/procedural/functional capabilities), is indeed very similar in capabilities to XML. What lacks, for example, is Unicode, but otherwise you can most easily translate any piece of XML into a REBOL representation. "But I can do that as well with Java!", you'll say, and right you are, after all, that's the point of XML. However - and that is the critical point, IMO, if you look at the REBOL representation and the Java object serialization side-by-side, you'll see that while the resulting serialization is practically incomprehensible to humans without tool support, the REBOL one is actually simpler than the XML form we started with. <person> <name>Chris</name> <age>22</age> </person> person [name "Chris" age 22] BTW, at http://www.langreiter.com/rebol/google/ you can find a simple wrapper around some functions the Google API provides, along with useful features like result caching. If you're interested in SOAP, you might also be interested in XML-RPC, which is the simpler predecessor of SOAP (and avoids practically all of the problems SOAP people have to cope with due to the higher level of complexity). http://earl.strain.at/space/rebXR Carl, one question, however, remains: What is the "official RT way" to write high-performance, concurrent servers in REBOL? (And no, Rugby is not an option, because it blocks when executing long-running functions). I have found no completely compelling way to do so yet. Best regards, -- Chris -- http://www.langreiter.com -- To unsubscribe from this list, please send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" in the subject, without the quotes.
