I actually think that XML has some of the best tooling in the entire industry. The problem is: It's mostly commercial tooling, which costs money. Stuff like Oxy

I actually think that XML has some of the best tooling in the entire industry. The problem is: It's mostly commercial tooling, which costs money. Stuff like Oxygen or XMetaL is pretty neat, and I always found Visual Studio's "Create Web Client from SOAP" pretty useful (especially if the Web Service is written in .NET, since it auto-generates a proper WSDL file).