When you get right down to it XML-RPC is about simple, easy to understand, requests and responses. ... SOAP, on the other hand, is designed for transferring far more complex sets of information.Which is a nice way to point out that if you strip away the kill 'em all, let god sort 'em out attitude from the get what you pay for debate that's been raging for the last few days, you're left with the perfectly reasonable everything has a tradeoff. Microsoft gives you illusion of ease of use and support and just plain working at the expense of a lock-in. *nix gives you the free beer and the free speech at the expense of making even the most trivial of tasks seem like putting a 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle together. Where, exactly, did all these men with hammers and their computerized utopias come from anyway?