Implementing the HTTP Request/Response Model inside of Silverlight

IntroductionSilverlight gives users the ability to create an extremely rich UI experience for the user, but what about the server?  How can I take advantage of Silverlight to do simple access to a server whether it's a LINUX Web Server or a Windows Web Server?  What if I want to make REST calls to my server?  Silverlight includes a few namespaces for doing simple request and response to and from