I think SOAP is a very important feature for "selling" Zope. As Toby Dickenson pointed out, the actual use cases are still a bit rare, but this might change a lot with the upcoming ".NET" products from Microsoft.
You are exactly on target here - there is a definite mindshare wave happening around SOAP / WS. More importantly there are absolutely actual use cases now and a clear enough picture of what's coming to start taking some decisions. The clarity part is very important, IMHO. It's taken a while to get there, but I think it's actually a good thing that SOAP support wasn't immediately woven in as soon as it was feasible. I've been pretty deeply immersed in web services lately, and its pretty clear (to me, though others may certainly argue the point) that "web services" support for Zope should _not_ look like the current xml-rpc support. I won't go into detail here - lets do that in the fishbowl :)
With regards to the implementation, it might be a good idea to try to do it the "components" way. Though, the new Zope components framework is still just a vision and proof of concept.
Certainly we want to make sure we do things the component way when appropriate - but I don't think we'll know exactly what that means until we have solid use cases.
I've set up a Fishbowl proposal for a Zope SOAP implementation a couple of weeks ago. Feel free to take it over, as I mainly put it onto the dev.zope.org Wiki to make sure it doesn't get forgotten ...
I will volunteer to start a separate proposal to try to combine the current SOAP proposals with my own biased agenda :) This is something that will _really_ require a group of people who care to pay attention and provide feedback (especially on the use cases, though I'll volunteer to make the best start I can). Brian Lloyd brian@zope.com Software Engineer 540.361.1716 Zope Corporation www.zope.com