I'm interested in building some web services that can be used both by external web browsers, but also by internal SOAP clients. The architecture I see is a web server talking to an independent database/file system entity, with local developers able to also write scripts that will interact with the entity. Essentially the function is an advanced ftp site.

With regard to security, I'm wondering how SOAP takes care of authentication and authorization. I read the local articles SOAP::Transport::TCP connection problems, troubles writing mod_soap clients and SOAP::Lite, then went further afield and found this article about authentication under SOAP UDDI. Google also found this article on SOAP extensions which looks promising if only it weren't almost five years old. This code sample also looked useful, even if it is in Java.

I like the idea of using SOAP -- does anyone here have other technology suggestions?