Perl.com has this article called “Don’t Be Afraid to Drop the SOAP” where Sam Tregar (the guy from about.com, the author of HTML::Template, HTML:: Pager, Inline::Guile, Devel:: Profiler and few others) explains why he had to drop SOAP from the application and go for something handmade. That is an interesting story that shows a number of goods and bads of SOAP as a part of solution to one specific problem.