intertwingly

Nelson Minar: If you're comfortable parsing XML, you're comfortable parsing doc/lit SOAP. But SOAP also offers the possibility of automatic data bindings (no parsing required) and WSDL (service description). Alas, those technologies still don't work so well in Perl, Python, or PHP where doc/lit support is weak. It does work pretty well in Java and .NET.

Automatic data bindings is not as important in dynamically typed languages.  Parsing XML in PHP is pretty easy with things like SimpleXML.  Taken together, this leads to the conclusion that a toolkit approach may not be required.

At the moment, in PHP if you want to do an HTTP POST, you need to use functions like fsockopen.  A built-in function that made it easier to do a arbitrary POST would be useful in its own right.