Summary

Tcl offers support for a wide range of standards for remote method invocations. We can use it for accessing APIs available from other applications or services. We can also export our own functionality.

We can interact with other applications using XML-RPC, which is widely used by websites as it is easier to implement and lightweight. All that is needed is to know the methods and arguments they take; we can then easily access methods from other applications. Our application can also benefit from SOAP. Similar to XML-RPC we can invoke commands over SOAP. In this case we only need to know the URL of the WSDL file, which is a definition of the web service, the methods it offers and all data types related to it.

Despite the advantages of easy integration with different languages and technologies, the SOAP standard has a major drawback. As it is uses XML and is designed to be self-descriptive, the overhead of metadata in each request is very high and SOAP should not be used for communication...