Thank you very much for the suggestion and the reference. At this point
I think this is a wish list item, since as far as I can tell everything
is working as advertised.
The last time I looked at this I decided to leave things the way they
were, because you have to parse XML in any case, and XML::Parser was the
hard part of the dependency chain to get installed, at least for me.
Since then, of course, Perl 5.12 has come out, and the SOAP::Lite
maintainers took their own sweet time silencing the complaints about the
use of 'defined %hash'. They eventually got around to it, but I do worry
a bit about long-term support.
As far as overhead goes, my bias (clearly labeled as such) is that
network overhead trumps SOAP overhead, though if you have data to the
contrary I will be glad to take it into consideration.
Tom
