RPC-XML

Changes for version 0.35 - 2002-01-27

Fixed a small bug in make_method that would have caused a failure if anyone used the command-line switches to specify data, rather than a base-file (specifically, the handling of the --code argument). Also clarified a few places in the man page.
Found bugs in both versions of the system.status server method (both the basic and the Apache flavor). Both were neglecting to set the "methods_known" value. Also found a bug in system.methodHelp. Amazing what writing the regression tests can uncover.
RPC::XML::Method is now a skeleton file, slated to be removed by or before 1.0. It has been renamed to RPC::XML::Procedure, and the RPC::XML::Method class is declared as an empty subclass of the RPC::XML::Procedure class. Procedures differ from methods in that they do not get the server object instance as a first parameter in the list that gets passed in.
Support for RPC::XML::Procedure (and general procedure vs. method) added to the DTD and the make_method tool. All the routines in the ex/ directory are declared as procedures, to further illustrate the concept.
When code blocks for XPL files are eval'd, they are given a "package" statement to force subsequent calls to be in the RPC::XML::Pprocedure namespace, rather than defaulting to main (a potentially dangerous assumption). The docs on routine-calling in RPC::XML::Server have been updated to discuss this.
Many more tests added to the suite for RPC::XML::Server.
Created the test suite for RPC::XML::Client.
RPC::XML::Client no longer returns a full RPC::XML::response object from any of its routines. Rather, simple_request still does what it always has, and send_request now returns a data-type value. All the data-type classes have a method called "is_fault" that returns false for all except (of course) RPC::XML::fault. This lets callers of send_request test the return value to see if it is a fault.
Added callback support for errors and faults to the RPC::XML::Client class. This allows programmers to tie specific actions to cases where a call returns a RPC::XML::fault object, or an outright error.
Created a separate test suite for RPC::XML::Server when used in conjunction with the Net::Server package (it skips if the latter is not installed on the system).
Almost all of the method-manipulation routines in RPC::XML::Server (all but add_default_methods()) now have counterparts called by the same name after s/method/proc/. This is purely for syntactical sugar and symmetry. Except in the case of add_proc(), where it actually ensures that a hash-reference calling convention is geared correctly to add a RPC::XML::Procedure object rather than RPC::XML::Method.