[Zope] xmlrpc and zope- newbie Q

hi, i spent quite some time going thru userland.com, zope's archive reading stuff about xmlrpc. i see the potential, but can't really grasp how we can achieve that with zope. the announcement http://www.zope.org:12080/archives/Catalog/archives/1999-June/005831.html provide a little example, but really, i don't get it. can any guru help explain what and how we can use xmlrpc with zope? can we use zope as the server? if so, how? and i assume zope can be the client updating other servers to, right? i'm really stuck here. me-in-a-bind thanks