Earlier this month at Networld+Interop, many of the worlds key soap developers spent a week together finding and fixing interoperability problems among their implementations of Simple Object Access Protocol. When I talked to developers at the SOAP Developer Community Interoperability Connectathon midway through the week, about 80 percent of combinations between servers and clients were working.
Several compatibility issues emerged during the week through the tests: Time-stamp handling, case sensitivity, ordering of elements in arrays and handling of the SOAP Action HTTP header all were causes of interoperability problems.
I found a very cooperative spirit among companies at the event—this is just the kind of collaborative effort thats needed to flush out inconsistencies in the SOAP 1.1 specification as well as find implementation bugs.