"There is little doubt that the hype associated with web services has reached astronomical proportions. Notably missing from the current flood of information, however, is a nuts-and-bolts examination of how to build applications which provide both browser-based access for human users and programmatic access for automated clients. ... This is not about the relative merits or weaknesses of SOAP, XML-RPC, or REST, nor will it attempt address the reasons why you might choose one and not another. The goal here is to demonstrate that, with a little forethought and a few Perl modules, you can easily create useful Web applications that can accessed from any or all of these types of clients."