The XMLRPC API

Besides accepting changes on the website, AdamsNames provides an XMLRPC interface to the registry. This is likely to be very attractive to resellers, and anyone else who needs to manipulate large numbers of domains.

As its name suggests, XMLRPC encodes remote procedure calls using XML! Procedures are identified by name and URL, and each procedure accepts and returns a set of parameters.

Parameters may be scalar (strings, integers, and what have you), arrays, or hashes (associative arrays). If this is starting sound complicated, then happily the details can be hidden behind client libraries in almost all cases.

In essence then, we have implemented a fancy CGI script on our website, which accepts a chunk of XML, and returns a different chunk of XML. The incoming data include the name of an operation which needs to be performed on the database and any associated data. For example, the operation might be a domain edit, and the associated data some new nameservers. The XML returned are just status codes. Although not required by the protocol, our procedures always return a single hash.

One might ask why this hasn't been implemented as a series of CGI scripts which accept parameters in the usual way: frankly we may well implement them in future, but such APIs rapidly get unwieldy. Using XMLRPC should, we hope, keep your client code much cleaner and free of bugs.

API documentation

• Common documentation
• domquery - querying a domain
• domreg - registering a domain
• domedit - editing a domain
• domdel - deleting a domain
• conquery - querying a contact
• conreg - registering a contact
• conedit - editing a contact

Example clients

A number of example clients are provided which exercise the XMLRPC API. In a reflection of personal preference, the examples below use Perl and Paul Kulchenko's XMLRPC::Lite modules.

Installing the examples