The list of SOAP resources is growing each day as more vendors and developers begin to support it. I would recommend that anyone who is interested in learning more about SOAP and contributing to the SOAP community check out the resources listed below and get involved now. The process of enabling tools and products to work with SOAP is going on right now, and getting feedback from the developer community will only help make those tools better.
Microsoft SOAP Toolkit for Visual Studio
The SOAP Toolkit for Visual Studio was updated in July, and it contains tools for helping developers use SOAP from the Visual Studio environment, especially Visual Basic. The ROPE (Remote Object Proxy Engine) provided with the Toolkit can generate proxies for SOAP endpoints that use the SDL format for defining their services. The Toolkit also comes with a wizard for working with SDL, and two implementations of SOAP listeners. You can download the toolkit at http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/general/toolkit_intro.asp
IBM SOAP4J/Apache SOAP
SOAP4J is a reference implementation of SOAP developed in Java. This implementation provides client and server source, XMI encoding, and SMTP support. You can download SOAP4J at http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/soap4j. IBM has now donated SOAP4J to the Apache Software Foundation, which also provides Xerces, a C++ XML parser that can be used to process SOAP messages. Both projects are available at http://xml.apache.org/.
DevelopMentor SOAP Resources
Don Box of DevelopMentor is one of the original authors of SOAP, and DevelopMentor has one of the best sources for SOAP information available. Their SOAP page at http://www.develop.com/soap/ provides a FAQ and links to whitepapers and sample implementations. More importantly, you can join the SOAP discussion list from their site at http://discuss.develop.com.
UserLand Software’s SOAP Weblog
Dave Winer is another one of the original authors of SOAP, and he maintains a site dedicated to news and resources related to SOAP. The site, http://soap.weblogs.com/, is just one of the many sites powered by Frontier, an integrated Internet content system that now supports SOAP.
SOAP-Web Services Resource Center
James Snell provides the SOAP-Web Services Resource Center, a collection of news, articles, and resources related to SOAP development. His site supports SOAP as a means of adding content, and his example SOAP endpoint was used for the example application with this article. You can check out his site at http://www.soap-wrc.com/webservices/default.asp.