Web services marketing materials usually use one of the two big frameworks, J2EE or .NET. But when you get down to the details, what is really important is the underlying standard used for communication.

Once you satisfy the standard, those large frameworks are no longer necessary. In other words, once you know how to communicate with other businesses, the internal details are irrelevant, You can implement the same protocol by using a giant technology or a more modest framework.

As Perl is THE language for parsing and formatting textual data it is obviously a very good choice when implementing these services.

Here are some of the protocols supported by Perl:

• HTTP - naturally (both server and client side)
• XML - Many modules that implement XML parsing or XML generation can be found on CPAN. There are also modules for specific uses of the XML protocol such as RSS.
• SOAP - Simple Object Access Protocol - there are several implementations of both SOAP server and SOAP client in Perl.
• WSDL - Web Services Description Language - With Perl, you can automatically generate WSDL files to enable integration of other languages with your service.