What we're doing today:

We will discuss the myths and realities of "web services." SOAP promises to expose applications as services over the internet using XML purveyed on top of standard transport protocols such as HTTP. We'll exchange Perl and Java objects, examine use of the libraries and what's happening "on the wire."

Although we'll look at some of the underlying mechanics of SOAP implementations, we are going to worry too much about these things are implemented. Our objective is to use SOAP in our applications, not implement the system level infrastructure.