How would you send a database query back to a unknown Soap Client? With unknown I mean that the client should be free to use any Soap-Implementation. Therefore it isn't possible for me to write any Serializer/Deserializer for a special object that could hold the information from a generic query. Am I right that I have no other choice then to use XML for this case? I see no flexible solution that would work with the types specified in the Soap-Spec (i.e. Arrays, String, int ..). Is Soap the right protocol to just send XML? What do I gain? It seems that it isn't that easy to just send XML over SOAP. Is XML-RPC better suited? What do you think?