Dave asks why I dislike using SOAP for RPC.

Answer: mostly because I don't think tightly-coupled RPC systems scale beyond the intranet. I'd like to imagine a world where a single XML document containing my health records can travel from my insurance provider to my doctor's office to my pharmacy to myself. I'd like to imagine that only the pieces of this document relevent to their work are readable. For very sophisticated scenarios like this, I think a much more messaging orientated system is needed.

I'm sure there are exceptions to this "RPC doesn't scale" rule of mine, but in my heart, it feels like messaging scales better.

BTW, Strange: I've had Thunder road in my head the past few days as well.