jsxmlRPC Live Examples

I'll provide more examples in this space as I get them ready. Here's an example of connecting to a service that provides IP address information:

Adding the button to the page is the easy part. Take note of the onclick event.

<input type="button" value = "look up my IP" onclick="alertIPInfo1()">

The function connected to the button in the onclick event is just plain old Javascript:

// create an "onclick" function for the button
function alertIPInfo1 () {

    // call to the webservice
    var info = rpc.getIPInfo()

    // call to another method of the webservice
    var ip = rpc.getIPAddress()

    //assemble results and alert()
    var str = "Your address is: "+ip+"\n"
    str += info.status + " by '" + info.registry + "' in " + info.country
    alert (str)
}

The rpc object in the function does all the magic. The button accesses a webservice located on this server at /ip/ip_ws.rb which provides the methods getIPAddress to determine the IP address of the caller and getIPInfo retrieve information about the address.

First, the library is included:

<script src="/js/all_scripts.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

The only other contact you have with the library is a call to XmlRpc.getObject() which instantiates a proxy object named rpc which is used in the function hooked up to onclick:

var rpc = XmlRpc.getObject("/ip/ip_ws.rb", ["getIPInfo", "getIPAddress"])

I know where I am! Where's 213.168.12.12?

Just checking out your own IP gets boring after a while.

Just hook up a box and a button with an onclick event.

<input type=text id="ip_field"> 
<input type=button value = "look up IP" onclick="alertIPInfo2()">

The code is similar to the code above. We reuse the rpc proxy object from above and added a shoddy bit of exception handling.

function alertIPInfo2 () {
    var ip = document.getElementById("ip_field").value
    var str = "Please enter a valid IP"
    try {
        var info = rpc.getIPInfo(ip) //reuse the rpc object here
        str = "Information for: "+ip+"\n"
        str += info.status + " by '" + info.registry + "' in " + info.country
    } catch (e) {
        // worry about this some other time :(  
    }
    alert (str)
}

So now you know. 213.168.12.12 is in Estonia.

The IP address webservice is described in greater detail in the tutorial I wrote which covers XML-RPC, Ruby, IP Addresses and lots of other stuff.

jsxmlRPC Live Examples

I know where I am! Where's 213.168.12.12?

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