After using SOAP libraries in Java, C#, Ruby, PHP, and Perl, I have found by any empirical measurement that Perl is by far the worst. I have to say that I think this is damning with faint praise:

"...but if you have anything unusual about the service you are accessing, you have to get familiar with the source - learning curve. Oh - and you need to have a pretty good understanding of SOAP and WSDL (e.g. you can interpret the raw XML)."

This kind of hacking is unnecessary in the SOAP libraries of the other languages I mention.

*Of course* writing a library to support SOAP+WSDL correctly "is going to be ton of work". And regardless of whether SOAP is too complex or not, it is becoming the de facto standard for web services integration schemes-- why? Because it's supported by Java, C#, Ruby, PHP, etc. -- but not by Perl, in any meaningful sense.

Reading the unanswered questions on the SOAP::Lite mail list is such an exercise in unmitigated pain, it makes we wish I had the skills and the time to tackle this project, or even start it.

But what really motivated my post is that my company has several large customers who use Perl SOAP clients to access our API. We are improving that API quickly, and we are trying to avoid recommending to our customers that they port their Perl SOAP client code to Java or Ruby.