Re: Philosophy/Codebase fixes

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpg redhat com>]

> 20) DefaultMethods should be small. Each method there should do a
> simple call on some other class. DefaultMethods should mostly contain
> type conversions, and many of those should be shunted into general
> "type mappings" registered w/ the XML-RPC bindings (I *think* it can
> do this, though I didn't see how immediately).
> 
> 21) We should consider using SOAP instead of XML-RPC. XML-RPC is all
> very well, but part of the mess we're getting is because we really
> could use an object API. We don't have to use the complex parts of
> SOAP, and Apache appears to have decent SOAP Java bindings.
> 

There are several reasons the rpc API is ugly and cannot be a thin
layer:

1 Cannot use object API with xmlrpc
2 We need to do all the type conversion work
3 We need to group stuff to minimize roundtrips

While 1 and 2 could be probably be solved using SOAP and type mappings,
3 is still an issue (see updateTopic method). A simple heartbeat takes
~0.3 s on Alex fast connection... (and something like 0.5 on my dialup).

I'm also worried about the effect of so high latency on features like
chat...

Marco