Utilizing XML-RPC or SOAP on an embedded system

As embedded systems are becoming more and more Internet enabled they are providing new interesting services. These systems need to communicate in a structured way preferably by utilizing standardize technologies. This paper takes a closer look at two of the emerging XML-based technologies that could be used for building these services. XML-RPC are remote procedure calls using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding. We also evaluate the simple object access protocol (SOAP), which is an XML syntax for exchanging messages. The first version of SOAP was based on XML-RPC. We evaluate the both technologies and experiment in particularly with XML-RPC by building a remote instrument panel application. Our application displays the revolutions per minute (RPM) value from a controller area network (CAN) engine like the RPM gauge found in most cars. The hardware platform was based on the TINI-platform developed by Dallas Semiconductor.