-- more acronyms --

 RPC	Remote Procedure Call
	The generic name for what we're talking about this week.
	Subroutines over the internet.

 XML-RPC
	Remote Procudure Call using XML
	An earlier idea very similar to but simpler than SOAP.  
	The XML payload is, like SOAP, contained with an HTTP body.
	It's more natural to use the HTTP headers for state information
	than it is with SOAP, some folks think.

 SOAP	Simple Object Access Protocol
	Comes in two styles, RPC and DOC.
	The RPC one is an XML-formatted remote procedure request, 
	embedded within any internet transport protocol like HTTP, FTP, etc.
	The DOC is a more open-ended XML document transaction.
	Verbose, complicated, layered, precisely specified,
	and desiged to be machine and language independent.
	Seems to be the consensus of the major players of how
	they're going to to RPC

 WSDL	Web Services Description Language
	An XML-formatted launaged which describes a web service's
	capabilities.  Part of UDDI.  Developed by Microsoft and IBM.
        See http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl.html

 XSD	XML Schema Definition
	A successor to the DTD's which is used in the SOAP world
	to define what a SOAP call can look like.
	Used within the WSDLs.

 UDDI	Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration
	A Web-based distributed directory that enables business to
	list themselves on the Internet and discover each other,
	similar to a traditional phone book's yellow and white pages.
	Uses SOAP procedure calls with specific names to find 
	or publish services.

 REST	Representational State Transfer
	The idea that the state of an HTTP call is represented
	within the URL (all that ?key=value&key=value) stuff.
	Thus the link and its functionality can be copied, bookmarked, 
	emailed to other people, and so on.
	Some folks are unhappy that SOAP, which imbeds all its 
	details within the body, typically bypasses this notion.
	The REST folks like the idea that GET and POST do different things
	(the 2nd changes the servers state, and cannot be cached, 
	while the first can) and don't want to hide that in other 
	payloads.  
        See for example http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/02/20/rest.html

 .NET	Microsoft's version of network computing, 
	which also uses SOAP for distributed procedure calls.