For Application Development is bitcoind RPC the Only Way? I am looking at building an application using Bitcoins, and being a newbie the only real resources I have found regarding how to interact with the network is to issue RPC commands to the bitcoin-qt client running as a service.

I've played with this a bit and I am curious if there are other clients that do the same thing? Or is this client the only game in town?
You have many options but Bitcoind is a popular one due to its initial ease.


Use Bitcoind
Use an API such as Coinbase or Blockchain.info be careful as these can be slow and not as secure.
Use one of the many libraries made for various languages. Bitcoinj for Java, Libbitcoin for C++, Gocoin for Golang, and for other languages like Python and Javascript you can always find tools in a github search. This is the search for Python libraries in python.