What is XML-RPC? Stripping all the technological detail away, it is merely a specific way of requesting data and getting a response back. It uses xml to make the request and sends and receives the data over http. (A more technical discussion can be found here.)

I’m currently working on a project that needs to get data from a WordPress installation. Fortunately, WordPress provides an XML-RPC interface which includes several stock APIs as well as a WordPress specific API. This is far more efficient than using custom templates or parsing actual html pages for both sides of the transaction.

With all that said, how do you use it? Depending on what you are trying to do and the platform you are using, there should (hopefully) be a nice library already coded so you can worry about requesting and receiving data without fretting about the details of xml-rpc. However, sometimes a q&d (quick and dirty) script is useful to test a request and look at what is actually coming back. I do that using a simple php script:
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