Web Services and SOAP

I experimented with SOAP as an easy way of making scalable, distributed systems. By using SOAP for the communication between major components it allows them to be moved to a different machine as load increases. In addition SOAP's language-independence means a component can be easily replaced with one written in a different language (maybe for speed, developer familiarity or access to a library not available in the main language of your project).

If interested I wrote an article (now three years old), Pass The SOAP, that shows example SOAP client code in PHP, Python and Java. Example code for the SOAP server is also included.

Since then I have also used Flash Remoting which enables easy interfacing of Flash with web service servers. Commercial gateways are available for Java, .NET and Cold Fusion as well as open source gateways for PHP and Perl. (Update: However I generally prefer Flash XML sockets for server/client communication.)