Testing xml-rpc with AppleScript
17/12/06 19:10 |
AppleScript
Recently I was debugging an xml-rpc web service in a
Java application. It wasn't a particularly onerous
task, but the compile/deploy/test loop was taking
it's time and, well, I was getting bored so I decided
to see if I could knock together a quick and simple
test application in a scripting language. I briefly
looked at Perl and Python to see what would be
involved and it looked simple enough, but I'm kind of
a Mac fanboy and I wondered how hard it would be to
do what I wanted in AppleScript.
I didn't wonder for long, AppleScript turned out to be ideal for this kind of thing due to the Apple Event Manager having built in support for both xml-rpc and Soap messages (so much so that they could almost be considered first class constructs in the language). Well, I never...
I looked around for a public xml-rpc server to write some example code for the blog with and the most commonly used one seems to be http://superhonker.userland.com - it's also quite a neat server as it accepts both xml-rpc and Soap. So, without further ado onto the code...
Calling an xml-rpc service from Applescript.
tell application "http://superhonker.userland.com/rpc2"
return call xmlrpc {method name:"examples.getStateName", parameters:25}
end tell
Returns "Missouri"
That's it! A three liner. 'parameters' is a List. So should you need to send more it's just a matter of writing something like parameters:{25, "test", etc}
Given that basic building block, I wrote some quick scripts to test the service I was debugging and got the job done a lot quicker than I was anticipating. I've always had a soft spot for AppleScript, but occasionally it does something stunning that makes your day ten times better and you wonder what life would be like if you couldn't use a Mac for your development machine :)
I didn't wonder for long, AppleScript turned out to be ideal for this kind of thing due to the Apple Event Manager having built in support for both xml-rpc and Soap messages (so much so that they could almost be considered first class constructs in the language). Well, I never...
I looked around for a public xml-rpc server to write some example code for the blog with and the most commonly used one seems to be http://superhonker.userland.com - it's also quite a neat server as it accepts both xml-rpc and Soap. So, without further ado onto the code...
Calling an xml-rpc service from Applescript.
tell application "http://superhonker.userland.com/rpc2"
return call xmlrpc {method name:"examples.getStateName", parameters:25}
end tell
Returns "Missouri"
That's it! A three liner. 'parameters' is a List. So should you need to send more it's just a matter of writing something like parameters:{25, "test", etc}
Given that basic building block, I wrote some quick scripts to test the service I was debugging and got the job done a lot quicker than I was anticipating. I've always had a soft spot for AppleScript, but occasionally it does something stunning that makes your day ten times better and you wonder what life would be like if you couldn't use a Mac for your development machine :)
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