Lemme see if I get this - you're caching your object handles in the @handle array, which contains references back to your blessed hash. This sounds almost like flyweight objects from the book. I don't think converting this to a flyweight object implementation will gain you much speed or anything, but it will gain you some elegance, as you no longer have to pass $id around to your methods.

Basically, a flyweight object is a blessed scalar which contains an index into an array of references to something (sound familiar? :) ). So, instead of passing $id around, why don't you make $id your object by blessing it, and put references the hashes containing {string} keys in an array, indexed by $id. Your constructor can then either take no argument, which creates a new entry in the array, or take an id to give you a handle on the object with that id.

Something like this:

use strict;
package Demo;
my @handles;

sub new {

  my $thingy=shift;
  my $args=shift;
  my $id=$args->{'id'};
  # Note that $args->{'id'} is autovivified here, but
  # this is no problem as we're testing for definedness
  # further on
  my $class=ref($thingy)||$thingy;
  unless (defined $id) {$id=scalar @handles};
  my $self=bless $id, $class;
  $handle[$self]={string => $args->{'string'}};
  return $self;
}
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Note that this code is untested, and that I used hash style argument passing (new({id=>11, string=>"camel"})) in the constructor to account for the optional presence of id.

I also have no idea how this plays with SOAP, as I have no experience on that matter.

Your accessor functions then do no have to have $id passed to them, they can just use $self. This will gain you a minor improvement in elegance, for what it's worth :)

CU
Robartes-