[Zope] [ZSyncer] XML-RPC considered bad

[Dieter Maurer]

We have used ZSyncer for 2 years without problem.
But, suddenly, it stopped working -- with an obscure "expat: not well formed
exception".

German special characters turned out to cause this problem.
XML-RPC has a big problem when it should work with a 
both non-ASCII and non-Unicode site as it does not handle
encoding of string data (especially, if it does not know
the implicit encoding).
When we have installed "PyXML" (to get expat, to use "text/xml" with
PageTemplates), the "expat" parser started to complain about
these non UTF-8 encoded characters. The formerly used parser apparently
just ignored such issues.


This is the second time that I got bitten by XML-RPC (its
sensitivity with respect to "string" data)..
I am now convinced that XML-RPC should not be used
for Python-Python communication.


I made a ZSyncer variant that uses ZPublisher.Client as
RPC protocol and Python's "pickle" to marshal data. This gets
rid of XML-RPC. If anyone is interested, let me know...


-- 
Dieter