In my opinion, there are two sides. One, I agree that SOAP::Lite is in desperate need for a cleanup. However, it does work for many applications. On the other side, it is not providing a high enough level interface for my taste: you have to understand too much of the horrible dark corners of the schema, wsdl, and soap specification.

Because I wished for a much more perlish interface, I started XML::Compile a few months ago. On the moment, it does understand schema's quite well. It also does collect information from WSDL files, but does not translate that to SOAP.

My development version has a partial SOAP implementation. On the moment only document/literal. There are quite some bits left to complete, which holds me back from releasing it. Especially, the connection between WSDL extracted data and the actual SOAP messages.

So: I expect Perl will soon have a full standard-compliant SOAP implementation with an extremely simple application interface. Keep an eye on new XML::Compile versions, released in the coming weeks. If you like to have a preview, then don't hesitate to ask.