What's the best way to send a message outside of Second Life?

As far as I can tell there are three methods available.

XML-RPC

HTTP

libsecondlife

As far as I can tell from the scant information that google and this forum has thrown up, you can't send an xml message from a SL script only recieve it. Has this changed? The wiki page for this seemed a bit outdated.

HTTP is probably the way I'm thinking of going but I'd rather go with XML-RPC as I've more familiarity working with it.

I don't really know a lot about libsecondlife, trying to read through its wiki to figure out what its capable off. Can it send data from within SL out and listen for reponses or did I get that completely wrong?

Sorry if this is a question which has been answered many times but I couldn't find a conclusive answer anywhere.

Just reading the chart on communication in the wiki and would it be possible to make a http request from my script to an external server and than have that server make an rpc call into my script in response? This is less than idea as I'll have to poll the server instead of waiting for events but could work for what I'm planning none the less.

Yes... http out + rpc in is a common pattern here.

-peekay

Are there any major stumbling blocks in this before I get started? Anything to look out for?

In a recent experiance of mine... RPC was not a reliable communication method. As multiple RPC calls at the same time were not being queued into an event queue, only one would come through.


In regards to your second post. If you are making an llHTTPRequest, the response to the request (first 2048 bytes) will automatically be received in the http_response() event.

If you need this to go to another prim, I would suggest using email.