Communicating between two computers

[donotspam-jen@personic.com]

FYI, I'm doing all of this on Windows NT, in case that makes a difference
...

Is there a good way to get a script on one computer to talk to a script on
another computer?  The process I'm thinking of is pretty simple ... I want a
script on a Web server to be able to send a command to a build server to
start a build process.  I'd also like the Web server to be able to query the
build servers to find out their status (so that two builds do not run at
once on the same machine, for example).

I've read a little about SOAP, but I think that my needs are probably a lot
simpler than that.  The easiest way to accomplish this is to setup a Web
server on each of the build machines, too, I guess ... but I was hoping that
I could just have the scripts that run on the build servers run as NT
services.

Thanks!

Jen