[pbowyer]

> [PHP is] so fast and elegant to consume a (SOAP or REST) webservice.

I would never choose PHP to consume a SOAP webservice if I could use C# or Java instead. And I say that as someone who's been consuming SOAP with PHP since 2001, from travel industry suppliers, major CRMs/ERPs and a bunch of quirky services.

PHP's SOAP library just isn't very good. From what I recall it doesn't support some of the security extensions natively, struggles with namespacing, has small changes to data structures when serializing/deserializing (I recall attributes/values being a pain to setup) and worked with some endpoints but not others. That could be the endpoints' fault, but when Microsoft is producting it - I sure expect the endpoint to work with PHP's bundled SOAP library.

Multiple times I fell back to constructing the XML myself (sometimes with the DOM builder, other times with handcrafted XML strings that were tested in SOAP-UI until they worked and given placeholders for data.

Last week I had to investigate ow a service had got the wrong data, and neded to load the XML response again to see the data in our app. The PHP XML extensions give a different structure to the SOAP extension; to get back the result you have to mock the response in a subclass of SoapClient, feed in your XML and let the extension parse it. That works, and is elegant in a way - but it could be so much better.

Rant over ;)