=head1 Section 4: Writing a Moosic Client in Python

As demonstrated in section 0, communicating with a Moosic server is very easy to
do with Python.  In this section, I'll merely elaborate on the details that were
omitted from section 0 for the sake of brevity.

First of all, you should know that LocalMoosicProxy() can be called with a
filename argument to specify the location of the Moosic server's socket file.
This is useful if moosicd was started with the "-c" option.  Refer to the
moosic_factory.py module's documentation (moosic_factory.html).

Next, note that many of the Moosic server's methods accept or return special
types of objects from the xmlrpclib module, namely Boolean and Binary.  These
object types serve the purpose of bridging the small mismatch between the
data-types supported by XML-RPC and Python's intrinsic data-types.  Boolean
objects present no unusual problem, since they evaluate to a correct truth value
without any extra effort.  However, you must take care when using the Moosic
methods that accept or return Binary objects.  Read the documentation for the
xmlrpclib module for details on how to work with these objects.  The basic
technique boils down to wrapping up a string inside a Binary object before
sending it to the server, and using the "data" attribute to access the string
data within the Binary objects returned by the server.  Regular strings can't be
used because XML-RPC's normal string data-type can't handle multiple 8-bit
strings within a single request if the strings use different encodings.