Programming PHP

equest, but it doesn’t know how to issue HTTP requests. For that functionality, you
must download the xmlrpc-epi distribution from http://xmlrpc-epi.sourceforge.net
and install the sample/utils/utils.php file. This file contains a function to perform the
HTTP request.
Example 11-16 shows a client for the multiply XML-RPC service.
Example 11-16. Basic XML-RPC client
'xmlrpc');
$result = xu_rpc_http_concise(
array(method => 'multiply',
args => array(5, 6),
host => '192.168.0.1',
uri => '/~gnat/test/ch11/xmlrpc-server.php',
options => $options));
echo "5 * 6 is $result";
?>
We begin by loading the XML-RPC convenience utilities library. This gives us the
xu_rpc_http_concise( ) function, which constructs a POST request for us:
$response = xu_rpc_http_concise(hash);
The hash array contains the various attributes of the XML-RPC call as an associative
array:
method
Name of the method to call
args
Array of arguments to the method
host
Hostname of the web service offering the method
uri
URL path to the web service
options
Associative array of options, as for the server
debug
If nonzero, prints debugging information (default is 0)
The value returned by xu_rpc_http_concise( ) is the decoded return value from the
called method.
There are several features of XML-RPC we haven’t covered. For example, XML-
RPC’s data types do not always map precisely onto PHP’s, and there are ways to
encode values as a particular data type rather than as the xmlrpc extension’s best
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