--- In Firebird-Architect@yahoogroups.com, Jim Starkey <jas@n...

> That strikes me as particulary awkward. How about something like:
>
> <Request operation="createDirectory">
> <Directory
> path="/var/www/html/demo"
> name="demo"
> index="home.nfs"
> webSite="DefaultSite"

Given your original statement:

>I'd be incline to structure the administration server so actual
>services are loadable modules for extensibility, with a local
>(probably XML) configuration file, with the requests passed as parsed
>XML. This would allow for third party administration tools within an
>established framework.

Wouldn't the XML-RPC specification be more flexible? You could have a
very thin Administration Server that didn't have to worry about
knowing the details of each possible call, all it would need to know
is I will call procedure xxx in library xxx with x, y & z as
parameters, so the create directory call would translate thus:

<methodCall>
<methodName>fbsystem.createDirectory</methodName>
<params>
<param>
<value><string>/var/www/html/demo</string></value>
<value><string>demo</string></value>
</param>
</params>
</methodCall>

The Administration Server would look at this, know it needs to load
the createDirectory method from within the fbsystem.so or dll, and
pass two string parameters to it.

With your example:

<Request operation="createDirectory">
<Directory
path="/var/www/html/demo"
name="demo"
index="home.nfs"
webSite="DefaultSite"
documentRoot="/var/www/html"
createDocument="home.nfs"
parentPath="/var/www/html">

The Administration Server would need to know all about the path,
index, website, documentroot, createdocument and parentpath values of
the directory element.

rgds

Si