Thanks for the input, Christof and Thomas.

I'm not worried about pounding the server as it is a major corporation's with an obligation to public-service; their servers should handle my assult very easily!

Essentially, I need the prospective "servers" to be able to communicate with the main program. The main program should control what is contained in the sequential HTTP requests, and delegate which server should be asking what. Then, the servers (ha ha! clients?) should communicate to the main program that they've completed their query, reply with the parsed data, and indicate that they're ready for another task. Also, the main program shoud be able to time-out an individual server, and redelegate its task to another if need be.

Whould this be a case of me needing to develop an interface, and use some sort of trigger mechanism or event-binding?