Wrapping Up
Higher-level toolkits and frameworks such as Microsoft .NET can obviously make the process of creating and deploying a web service very simple and painless. But for developers on a budget or who just like to know how the internals of the systems they are developing actually work, creating and deploying a SOAP-based Web service completely from scratch is a useful exercise.
Besides, there's something incredibly neat about knowing that with nothing more than a copy of Windows 98, Notepad, and a live Internet connection it is possible to build the same type of system that some developers wouldn't think of creating without a tons of RAM and a complex IDE.