SOAP certainly sucks, but regarding your comment on using lisp as the transfer protocol is a bad idea. Data transfer protocols must be verifiable - you should basically be able to write a piece of code that parses the data input and verifies that it will not do something bad if deserialized. Given that as far as I know, Lisp is turing-complete, this task is impossible. Therefore, Lisp, while being a nice programming language, is a very bad wire protocol.