Well, after looking into SOAP::Lite a little more, it appears that there is no real support for WSDL on the server side. This is a pretty big bummer. There is a module at CPAN called WSDL::Generator, though it would not install correctly via CPAN for me. WSDL::Generator looks pretty slick in theory, as it will generate a WSDL file from your perl source. I’ll have to look into this a little further, because I’m not into editing WSDL by hand. There is a WSDL editor available (free) from Cape Science, but that’s one more level of debugging that I’d rather not do.
I’ll have to do a little more digging before I figure out what to do with the status project. It’s a fun idea, and I think it could be useful at the same time. Porting over to Java once I have figured Axis out might be a good bet, or I could try playing in Python, another language that I sorta have a handle on. There are two implementations of SOAP for Python.
One thing that I’ve learned this afternoon/evening is that loosely typed languages make great SOAP clients, but not ideal servers.