xml-rpc

I need to make calls within sl to near real-time data on vehicle positions in the real world, so I can simulate their movement in sl. Someone suggested using xml-rpc. Does anyone have any experience with this, and how it is embedded in lsl scripts? Thanks for your help.

It looks as though XML-RPC may be deprecated or at least troubled:
/139/c2/158585/1.html#post1379244

As noted in that thread, you may be better off using llHttpRequest:
http://rpgstats.com/wiki/index.php?title=LlHTTPRequest which also contains examples

And nothing in SL even comes close to "real-time"; you should probably take this limitation into account. Good luck.

Thanks Malachi

Your probably limited to using HTTP requests at a fast rate to your server for polling. I was forced to go this rout since RPC was so flaky, yes I had to completely rewrite everything but glad I did because the HTTP method is pretty smooth.

Just limit the quantity of returned data from your web requests as much as you can to limit any excess bandwidth loading on your web server.

-Phidian

It's a shame that XML-RPC is so dodgy, as it's the only way for an external application to send data INTO SL reliably, especially for PHP scripts this is extremely troublesome since you can't do asynchronous things very well.

If you do get XML-RPC to work, it won't be anywhere near to real-time, for me (when it works) it typically takes 10-20 seconds to complete an XML-RPC transaction. This sucks for networked vendor servers (that contain the items you're selling and hands them out), as the only alternative is to use llHTTPRequest and poll a page frequently until some data changes, and even then there's no easy way for the vendor to detect if something failed at this point.

Funny - not much has changed since I made that post almost a year ago (that Mal referenced).

After a 2-year love affiar with XMLRPC, I'm filing for divorce. The seperation process is well underway

It sucks for critical communications - you're *way* better off using HTTP, as said above.

It seems sad--I was using RPC just a couple of months ago and it was reliable and quick. Someone must have come in totally hammering the thing since then, right? I haven't tested it recently.

Yep I think so, since the RPC server seems to be some centralized server somwhere it must be getting slammed with requests by the growin web interfaced builds and it appears Linden Labs is unmotivated to change things with it. (At least that we can tell)

Honestly I think they can revive it if they made the RPC communications be sim specific, I think they would just need to return the RPC handler URL along with the channel key when a channel is opened.

But for now... Its "Use at your own risk".

-Phid

LL's official response to the XML-RPC issue is that they will not be depricating the functionality but also not suppporting it. A hardware upgrade was done to the one server that handles all XML-RPC traffic a while back and that will be the last of anything they plan on doing. So it is as good as it's gonna get but more prabably it'll be getting worse and worse as time passes.

I'm finding the same thing. It's been getting worse lately. Someone above mentioned 20 second response times-- I'm seeing 60 seconds plus now (when it works at all, which is like 30%). I think we can all agree that it's a sad thing to say goodbye to XMLRPC, but... goodbye, XMLRPC.

* throws flowers on XMLRPC's coffin, and starts rewriting for HTTP polling *