xml-rpc is technology that provides remote procedural calls to components over networks it routes requests over the http protocol and ships data back and forth packaged as xml text to clientsweb servers appear to be simple functionswhen function calls are issuedpassed data is encoded as xml and shipped to remote servers using the web' http transport mechanism the net effect is to simplify the interface to web servers in client-side programs more broadlyxml-rpc fosters the notion of web services--reusable software components that run on the web--and is supported by python' xmlrpc client modulewhich handles the client side of this protocoland xmlrcp serverwhich provides tools for the server side soap is similar but generally heavier web services protocolavailable to python in the third-party soapy and zsi packagesamong others corba orbs an earlier but comparable technologycorba is an architecture for distributed programmingin which components communicate across network by routing calls through an object request broker (orbpython support for corba is available in the third-party omniorb packageas well as the (still available though not recently maintainedilu system java and netjython and ironpython we also met jython and ironpython briefly at the start of in the context of guis by compiling python script to java bytecodejython also allows python scripts to be used in any context that java programs can this includes weboriented rolessuch as applets stored on the server but run on the client when referenced within web pages the ironpython system also mentioned in similarly offers web-focused optionsincluding access to the silverlight ria framework and its moonlight implementation in the mono system for linux screen scrapingxml and html parsing tools though not technically tied to the internetxml text often appears in such roles because of its other rolesthoughwe'll study python' basic xml parsing supportas well as third-party extensions to itin the next part of this bookwhen we explore python' text processing toolkit as we'll seepython' xml package comes with support for domsaxand elementtree style xml parsingand the open source domain provides extensions for xpath and much more python' html parser library module also provides html-specific parserwith model not unlike that of xml' sax technique such tools can be used in screen scraping rolesto extract content of web pages fetched with urllib request tools windows com and dcom the pywin package allows python scripts to communicate via com on windows to perform feats such as editing word documents and populating excel spreadsheets (additional tools support excel document processingthough not related to the internet itself (and being arguably upstaged by net in recent years)python internet development options