Sam Tregar of Primedia (who wrote the Bricolage SOAP interface years ago) writes an article on perl.com describing the Krang Data Set, an alternative to SOAP he developed after discovering the many pitfalls of relying on SOAP for large amounts of network traffic.

I’ve personally administered, debugged, and generally become pissed off at SOAP-based information transports, for a number of the reasons he’s mentioned. Trying to send useful XML documents en masse over SOAP is like trying to send christmas gifts via USPS. It takes forever to wait in line (that is, if you’re lucky enough to be delivering to a decent messaging server), has stringent packing requirements, is often late, and also sometimes never even reaches the destination intact.

If a KDS sneakernet (or scp-net) is faster and more reliable alternative to SOAP with large XML documents, i’m interested.