In response to mail from a fellow swedish developer:
I’ll skip the “what is XML?”-links. For those, try this – or maybe this one. My focus right now is interfacing XML documents in a custom-built editor with an objectoriented business framework – preferably via a lightweight network protocol.
Note that Pike can do something similar right now, using XML-RPC!
Eric Prudhomme of W3.org has a very good, short matrix comparing various XML-based network protocols. Discussions about this (and much else) are in the XML-dist-app newsgroup.
Personally, I think SOAP is the most interesting protocol, for several reasons, not the least that it explicitly supports XML-Schema as a mechanism for typing and extensibility. Also, the current scarcity of good implementations seems about to end soon – and Microsoft’s Web Services SDK will probably be released in April.
Note that the SOAP protocol doesn’t define exactly how complex object graphs should be serialized – but here is one way.