[Zope] External http access.

[Ben Last (Zope)]

From: Dieter Maurer [mailto:dieter at handshake.de]
>The only reason why the ZMI is difficult to use with XML-RPC
>is that the management functions like to perform redirects
>and return HTML responses.
But this is sufficient to make it very difficult; parsing the HTML reply is
non-trivial; though a useful trick is to embed a fixed string in the
standard_error_message template that one can detect.  Unfortunately, not
every manage_ function uses the standard error template for all errors.

Using xmlrpc is sufficiently simpler than using urllib (to call ZMI methods)
that it approaches having one line per ZMI request, which makes for simple
code, which makes for maintainable code.  That, to me, is worth spending a
day's effort on, so...

What I'm going to do is to look into building a generic set of wrappers for
the basic functions which will provide a simple error status reply, as much
as is possible.  Then I'll provide these to anyone who wants them.  If such
a thing has already been built, please let me know!

regards
ben