Hi Lorna. I found your article to be very interesting and wish I had read it earlier having just published some working examples on how to create a SOAP WS implemented using PHP on the server side and accessed via a small Python application: https://tommorrisblog.wordpress.com/2015/02/07/soap-wsdl-examples-with-php-and-python-scripting/ . I agree that there’s a lot of misleading information out there and a general lack of good/solid guidance on how to approach this – especially to ensure alignment between the client code -> WDSL -> server code. I reached a conclusion in that for the WSDL, everything except very simple XML message exchanges are best generated with the help of an IDE. Good luck with your writing and thanks for publishing this article!