XML-RPC Subsystem
The XML-RPC subsystem is the last of the major PyBlosxom subsystems that we need to cover. It is interesting because it is implemented entirely via the plugin system - in fact it's contained entirely in the contributed plugins distribution. What we want is a way for PyBlosxom to handle requests made via XML-RPC. Initially, this is because we want to support some of the popular XML-RPC based blog authoring API's, such as the Blogger and Metaweblog API's. But we'd also like to make it possible for plugins (like the pingback handler for the comments plugin) to offer some of their services via XML-RPC, which means that we cannot hardwire the set of functions that are processed by the XML-RPC system.
The XML-RPC system consists of a PyBlosxom plugin that acts as a dispatcher for all XML-RPC services. This plugin, named xmlrpc, is wired in via PyBlosxom's cb_handle callback, since we want it to process any HTTP request that contains an XML-RPC request. Recall that cb_handle bypasses the regular blosxom_handler flow through the PyBlosxom engine. xmlrpc also takes care of authenticating XML-RPC requests. The plugin takes care of dispatching XML-RPC requests by using a dispatch table stored in the plugin's args dictionary. The table is a Python dictionary that is accessed via the 'methods' key.
Every plugin that wants to offer its services via XML-RPC needs to provide a cb_xml_rpc_register function. This function must update the 'methods' dictionary with entries the map the XML-RPC method names to functions in the plugin's module. XML-RPC plugins may use any of the other PyBlosxom callback methods as well.
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