For all those specialists out there about to build their own webservice: Great, a good idea. Finally we are getting closer to sharing information across the web according to standards. Content is not something locked in a webpage, but it is out there to be shared and offered to the right person at the right time.
I do hope people will accept that this means their webpage is no longer only their webpage. Content deliverers are no longer proud owners of a webpage, they deliver content which can be delivered in a multitude of places and systems.
Some of you may have noticed: this weblog supports an RSS feed. This is quite intentional: try it out! You can get my content without visiting my site :-)

But all of this is simply an introduction to my main rant and rave of this evening: If you want to set up a SOAP webservice using php, beware of the PEAR package. It may actually work, but why is there no decent documentation? Why is there not one version beyond the Beta status?
I am so much more pleased about using the Nusoap package. This worked first time! We are experimenting with it now, but it seems to work quite nicely.