Anyway, the interface has moved from telnet-based to web-based and uses XMLHTTPRequest (AJAX) to perform XMLRPC calls on the purely-python webserver. Python provides a wonderful standard module called 'xmlrpclib' to marshall/unmarshall XMLRPC requests and responses to/from python and XML. JavaScript, howver, lacks these marshalling features.

Some quick googling found jsolait and vcXMLRPC. Both of these are huge frameworks and are well beyond my particular needs. BOTH of them have "the suck" and fail to cleanly load into Firefox without warnings. Bah! Back at square-one. I'm left without a way to marshall xmlrpc requests and responses between javascript and xml

I spent some time learning about XMLRPC. Turns out it's a very very simple xml-based protocol for calling methods and getting results. JavaScript has DOM already so parsing XMLRPC messages is very easy.

Take a look at the 'rpcparam2hash' and 'hash2rpcparam' functions in pimp.js and see how I convert between JavaScript hashes (dictionaries) and XMLRPC messages. If I get bored I may create my own xmlrpc library specifically for making xmlrpc calls with javascript. If you want this to get done, please let me know and give me encouragement ;)