62 lines
3.2 KiB
Plaintext
62 lines
3.2 KiB
Plaintext
For a release-by-release change history, see
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<http://xmlrpc-c.sourceforge.net/change.html>.
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XML-RPC For C/C++ was created by Eric Kidd in 2000, when XML-RPC was
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new and vital. Its development was funded in significant part by
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First Peer, Inc. Eric released the package in January 2001 and set up
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an extensive project to maintain it. The project used virtually every
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feature on Sourceforge, had about 8 official developers, and
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distributed code in various formats. There were mailing lists,
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trackers, CVS branches, RPMs, and a full PHP-based web site, just to
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name a few features of the project.
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Then everything ground to a halt in June 2001, with the disappearance
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of Eric. We don't know what happened to him, but Google searches in
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late 2004 indicated he dropped off the face of the web at that time.
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While people continued to use Xmlrpc-c, and some developed fixes and
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enhancements and posted them to the Sourceforge trackers, the release
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remained frozen at 0.9.10. The web site also became frozen in time.
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In the years that followed the great freeze, XML-RPC became
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marginalized by more sophisticated alternatives such as SOAP. XML-RPC
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consequently became rather stable and interest in Xmlrpc-c levelled
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off.
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This dark age of Xmlrpc-c lasted until October 2004, when Bryan Henderson
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set out to find an RPC mechanism to use in one of his projects. Bryan
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found XML-RPC and then Xmlrpc-c. He decided that the two were almost right
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for his needs, but he needed some small extensions.
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On finding out that the project was orphaned, Bryan decided to take it
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over. Bryan became the Sourceforge project administrator through
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Sourceforge's abandonned project process, then gathered the patches
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that had been submitted over the years and made a come-back release
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called 1.0.
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Bryan then proceeded to add a lot of features in subsequent releases
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about every two months. Most of it was code Bryan wrote himself, but
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significant parts were contributed by others, as you can see in the
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detailed history below. Among the larger enhancements was a new
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C++ interface; the old one was a fairly weak wrapper around the
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C interface and required the user to manage memory and access the
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underlying C structures; the new one used pure C++ principles with
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automatic memory management.
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Bryan also wrote a complete user's manual. Surprisingly, in spite of
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the wide array of features the project had, documentation wasn't one
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of them. There was only a smattering of information available on how
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to use the package.
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One significant change Bryan made to the project was to strip it down
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considerably. In order to concentrate the small amount of time Bryan
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had available for Xmlrpc-c development on actual code and
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documentation, Bryan had to greatly reduce the amount of bureaucracy
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involved in administering the project and making releases, and reduce
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the set of skills required to do it. Bryan made static make files
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(for GNU Make) to replace the two extra build stages that originally
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generated make files. Bryan moved away from Libtool and toward simple
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compiling and linking. Bryan eliminated all pre-built distributions;
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each of his releases consisted of a single source code tarball, and
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that tarball was not signed. Bryan removed some redundant sources of
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information from the package and the web site.
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