[Zope-Moz] Mozilla XML-RPC (was Status)

[Martijn Pieters]

On Sun, May 07, 2000 at 12:58:34AM -0500, Jerry Spicklemire wrote:
> If this is what it sounds like, will a Mozilla enabled page be able to do
> amazing stuff like populate drop downs on demand? So it won't be
> necessary, for example, to ship an entire table (array) of options hard
> coded in the HTML (after being dynamically generated from a ZSQL query).
> IOW the GUI Element would contain only the query, in the form of an XML-RPC
> call, which will run as needed, as in only if the user selects it.

Yes, XML-RPC will enable out-of-band server queries, that can be used to stuff
like this. Note however, that the component that I added, can only be reached
through XPConnect, a service that also allows you to access the local
filesystem.. 

Because of this, any javascript, be it local or remote, will have
to request access to XPConnect explicitly. Only chrome (the way ZoeStudio is
being built) has unrestricted access. Currently, this is a very course
security measure, you get all of XPConnect, or nothing. I understand that this
is going to be more finely grained in the future.

There is however, a different feature under review for inclusion in the
featureset, which allows javascript to access remote XML documents out of
band. This is limited to GET requests only, but it'll allow you to specifiy a
URL, and get returned a new DOM Document representing the retrieved XML. This
mechanism isn't protected as XML-RPC is, and can certainly be used to
implement drop-down menus like you describe.

For the out-of-band retrieval of XML and parsing this into a DOM, see:

  http://www.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=615656831
  http://www.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=617758853

-- 
Martijn Pieters
| Software Engineer    mailto:mj@digicool.com
| Digital Creations  http://www.digicool.com/
| Creators of Zope       http://www.zope.org/
|   The Open Source Web Application Server
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