in reply to How to use Perl instead of Coldfusion.
“Cold Fusion cfspoken cfhere.” CFDon’t cfpanic.
ColdFusion tends to be a bit baroque in its approaches. If you truly know absolutely nothing about the web service that you will be contacting, and/or its public interface must be regarded as malleable and your solution must be future-proof (in the eyes of some committee somewhere), then you may have little choice but to jump in with both feet and use e.g. SOAP::WSDL. Otherwise, and I expect far more likely, simpler modules like SOAP::Lite should be more than sufficient.
You will definitely appreciate the relative brevity of Perl’s syntax for successfully invoking a web service. CF’s syntax is by comparison very baroque. You can sort-of glom what call is made, what parameters are being passed-in, and where the result comes out, but cfit’s cfnot cfeasy.
Martin Kutter’s passing comment (in SOAP::WSDL::Manual’s page) that “sometimes, WSDL definitions are incomplete,” just might qualify as the world’s biggest understatement. Sometimes, WSDLs aren’t worth the bits they’re printed on, such that clients which rely too heavily on them (such as ColdFusion ...) can be seriously tripped-up by an “impedance mismatch” between what the service promises and what it actually does. If you can figure a stable way to make the call that doesn’t fool around with all that extra protocol-baggage ... and you almost always can ... definitely go that route.