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.
Z. Yang, D. Yang, C. Dyer, X. He, A. Smola, and E. Hovy. Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, page 1480--1489. San Diego, California, Association for Computational Linguistics, (June 2016)