Of course there are libraries that do all of this stuff - and they work nearly all the time. However, when they stop working you end up having to look at what is actually going over the wire (or WDSL if you are really unlucky) to try and work out what on earth is going on.

98% of the time SOAP works without too many problems - the trouble is that those other 2% of cases can be truly awful to debug because you have then got to wade through all of the crap that is in there to support the "easy to use" functionality.

SOAP should die.

Typo: should have been WSDL

Afraid not. The WSDL is so baroque, so deeply nested with objects inside objects inside objects, that no SOAP client is capable of parsing it.

To write requests, I've had to resort to building templates manually. To read responses, I've had to resort to walking the DOM tree to hunt-and-peck for the fields I need.

Would a JSON implementation be better then? I mean, it sounds like the design is just painful, and regardless of the implementation it would be horrible.

Or do you think JSON encourages simplicity enough to overcome these issues? That the person who created his interface would have created something cleaner?

I guess what I'm asking is, is it the API that sucks, or the implementation (or both)?

* I've never had issues with XML-RPC or SOAP implementation. I prefer JSON because it can use it from JavaScript easily. But having consumed SOAP and XML-RPC API's (mostly with banks), I've never had problems that I'd blame on the implementation.