Working with XML-RPC in PHP

XML-RPC is a very straightforward and effective data transport mechanism. Requests and responses are formatted in a common way. Clients and service providers can easily implement this simple protocol. PHP has a group of XML-RPC functions that are made for working with XML-RPC data.

PHP's XML-RPC functions are documented at: <a href="https://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.xmlrpc.php" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">PHP: XML-RPC Functions - Manual</a>. The collection is small but invaluable. They can be grouped into functions that enable PHP applications to be XML-RPC clients, or functions that create PHP-powered XML-RPC services. These functions are available, if PHP was compiled with the –with-xmlrpc option.

To make your mashup, you need to know how to create an XML-RPC request, how to call the service, and how to process the return data. We will focus our attention on three PHP functions that will help us do this: xmlrpc_encode_request to convert our PHP variables into XML-RPC format, xmlrpc_decode does the reverse, and xmlrpc_is_fault checks to see if there was an error with our request to the server