This is an effort to update the RoX (RPC over XML) XML-RPC system to Java 1.7. The original RoX is hosted at http://rox-xmlrpc.sourceforge.net/.

RoX is a well-written, efficient and scalable XML-RPC server. Its code has not been modified by its author (James Greenfield) since 2008. It was developed for Java 1.4 and updated for Java 1.5, but lacks generic type parameters, and depends on old versions of a number of libraries, including obsolete Sun SSL APIs.

I plan to use RoX as a foundation for an HTTP server project, so I have imported the code here, and I am gradually transforming it into modern Java.

Done:

• Removed all code related to handling XML-RPC calls (what remains is socket handling code, and a lightweight HTTP protocol handler)
• Inferred generic type parameters where possible (and filled in a bunch more manually)
• Fixed all compiler warnings and errors in src/
• Unit tests now almost all pass (exceptions listed below)

To do:

• Format code
• Fix compiler warnings in tests/
• There are two failing tests:
  • Two test files were missing from the distribution: src/com/flat502/rox/test/test.truststore and src/com/flat502/rox/test/keystore.p12 (needed by tests/com/flat502/rox/client/Test_SSL.java)
  • testStringParam_64K() in tests/com/flat502/rox/marshall/xmlrpc/TestBase_MethodCallUnmarshaller.java fails where the expected string length is 70000 but the actual string length is 4464. May be a bug in Xerces?
• Make API typesafe where possible (this will require some work, and my primary interest is not in XML-RPC, so I may not change that part of the API -- patches welcome)

Future optimization possibilities:

• Replace as many uses of synchronized as possible with lock-free data structures in java.util.concurrent, and/or with finer-grained locks. (RoX was created before java.util.concurrent.)
• Search for opportunities to pre-allocate storage in each worker thread.

1. What this is

On the off chance you're reading this on its own or without any idea what the random bits strewn around next to it are this is the readme for RoX, an XML-RPC library for Java.

Currently RoX is hosted by SourceForge and can be found online at:

http://rox-xmlrpc.sourceforge.net/

2. What it contains

You should find the following files and top-level directories along with this document:

CHANGES.txt A change history for RoX. LICENSE.txt A copy of the license this verion of RoX is released under. README.txt This document. doc General documentation and JavaDoc API documentation. src The sample code included in the examples. nanoxml-*.jar The NanoXML library (required at runtime). rox.jar The RoX library (required at runtime). xmlunit-1.0.jar XMLUnit unit testing library (required for testing).

3. Getting Started

Open your favourite IDE (or text editor) and start playing with the demos. If you're the kind of programmer who reads all the documentation first then start with the examples page which will talk you through the various ways in which you can use RoX.