Interest in Web services has increased rapidly since their first appearance a few years ago. They are a key value-added feature of today's Internet, making it feasible to combine different applications and so generate new services based on existing applications. Feasibility, however, doesn't mean easy connectivity to all we can see and use on the Internet - in terms of either usability or software integration. The author introduces Web services and how to use SOAP to assemble such services. He presents an example built from scratch, lessons learned along the way, and a comparison of various SOAP implementation states of practice