A shortcoming of PocketBuilder 1.x and 2.x has always been the difficulty in accessing Web Services. This shortcoming had always irritated us, but the limitations of the PocketPC and the size of the traditional PowerBuilder approach prevented us from providing an adequate traditional solution. We have a sample up on CodeXchange that wraps a simple API around the free "Pocket SOAP" client, but that had its own limitations and we were never really satisfied with it.

When I read D. Chance's article, "Consuming Amazon Web Services using SQL Anywhere 10.0.1" (on the Sept 2007 issue of PowerBuilder Developer's Journal), I slapped my forehead and saw a solution. I always knew that the iAnywhere folks had added XML processing and SOAP client and server support to the database back in version 9.0 and have kept on improving it, but it just never clicked how I could use it until I read her article.