It frustrates me to no end that SOAP is the face of RPC. SOAP is pretty much the worst thing ever, but there are RPC alternatives that don't have SOAP's problem

It frustrates me to no end that SOAP is the face of RPC. SOAP is pretty much the worst thing ever, but there are RPC alternatives that don't have SOAP's problems and are less weird (i.e. don't attempt to adhere to an impossible ideal). I highly recommend checking out JSON-RPC 2.0 or just rolling your own to see how easy it can be. The one I wrote is 200 lines of code and slightly more robust than you actually need to have a working RPC server (I added automatic casting and support for optional parameters with defaults, just for my convenience.)