"Philippe Marschall"<philippe.marschall@netcetera.ch> wrote:

Yes, SOAP it not just some XML format. You have to sink a lot of resources into the implementation and tool support. Keep in mind that even Cincom with all their resources didn't manage to make their SOAP library talk to SAP. They had to build a proprietary connector.

That's not quite what happened, the SAP Connect relies on the WS stack to do the WS part, it adds SAP specific integration, and yes it also provides the alternative proprietary RFC protocol as well (not everything in SAP was exposed via WS at that point). Anyway, I can certainly sympathise with the sentiment expressed in this thread. IMO, CORBA comes out as the pinacle of simplicity when compared to the WS stack as it is today. The problem is not just the sheer number of specs, but also the laxity and vagueness of individual specs themselves. There's so much room for different interpretations of everything that interoperability beyond trivial examples is nearly impossible (generally the small monkeys just have to ape what the few gorillas decide to do). Anyway, the easiest in this case likely is to simply observe the communication of the PHP based solution and implement just that specific protocol. Each WSDL spec basically defines (whatever that means in the WS context) a custom protocol, you need just one of those, not all of them.