For much of the first year or two in the life of Web services - and indeed all of their history up to that point - they were about remote procedure calls (RPC); exposing remote APIs across the Internet in order to facilitate machine-to-machine communication and ultimately, business-to-business integration over the Internet. It didn’t take very long however, for Web services proponents to realize that they needed to distance themselves from RPC and its well-deserved reputation as a poor large scale integration architectural style, due to the failure of systems such as CORBA, DCOM, and RMI to see any widespread use on the Internet. So, sometime in 2000/2001, collective wisdom in the space shifted towards a preference for “document oriented” services. Vendors quickly jumped on board with upgraded toolkits, and that was that; documents were the New Big Thing.