For a release-by-release change history, see
<http://xmlrpc-c.sourceforge.net/change.html>.
XML-RPC For C/C++ was created by Eric Kidd in 2000, when XML-RPC was
new and vital. Its development was funded in significant part by
First Peer, Inc. Eric released the package in January 2001 and set up
an extensive project to maintain it. The project used virtually every
feature on Sourceforge, had about 8 official developers, and
distributed code in various formats. There were mailing lists,
trackers, CVS branches, RPMs, and a full PHP-based web site, just to
name a few features of the project.
Then everything ground to a halt in June 2001, with the disappearance
of Eric. We don't know what happened to him, but Google searches in
late 2004 indicated he dropped off the face of the web at that time.
While people continued to use Xmlrpc-c, and some developed fixes and
enhancements and posted them to the Sourceforge trackers, the release
remained frozen at 0.9.10. The web site also became frozen in time.
In the years that followed the great freeze, XML-RPC became
marginalized by more sophisticated alternatives such as SOAP. XML-RPC
consequently became rather stable and interest in Xmlrpc-c levelled
off.
This dark age of Xmlrpc-c lasted until October 2004, when Bryan Henderson
set out to find an RPC mechanism to use in one of his projects. Bryan
found XML-RPC and then Xmlrpc-c. He decided that the two were almost right
for his needs, but he needed some small extensions.
On finding out that the project was orphaned, Bryan decided to take it
over. Bryan became the Sourceforge project administrator through
Sourceforge's abandonned project process, then gathered the patches
that had been submitted over the years and made a come-back release
called 1.0.
Bryan then proceeded to add a lot of features in subsequent releases
about every two months. Most of it was code Bryan wrote himself, but
significant parts were contributed by others, as you can see in the
detailed history below. Among the larger enhancements was a new
C++ interface; the old one was a fairly weak wrapper around the
C interface and required the user to manage memory and access the
underlying C structures; the new one used pure C++ principles with
automatic memory management.
Bryan also wrote a complete user's manual. Surprisingly, in spite of
the wide array of features the project had, documentation wasn't one
of them. There was only a smattering of information available on how
to use the package.
One significant change Bryan made to the project was to strip it down
considerably. In order to concentrate the small amount of time Bryan
had available for Xmlrpc-c development on actual code and
documentation, Bryan had to greatly reduce the amount of bureaucracy
involved in administering the project and making releases, and reduce
the set of skills required to do it. Bryan made static make files
(for GNU Make) to replace the two extra build stages that originally
generated make files. Bryan moved away from Libtool and toward simple
compiling and linking. Bryan eliminated all pre-built distributions;
each of his releases consisted of a single source code tarball, and
that tarball was not signed. Bryan removed some redundant sources of
information from the package and the web site.
