OnLamp.com has a new article posted today that aims to show you how to call SOAP servers from Javascript in Mozilla.

Traditional web pages interact with the server only when generating a page or submitting a form. This is fine in some cases, but in others it causes problems for a webmaster. For example, there is no way to validate a user's input against a database midway through filling out the form, or to populate elements based on the user's input, unless a large amount of data is sent along with the page. In many cases this is a prohibitive amount of data, such a multimegabyte or even gigabyte database.

They give a sample SOAP service in PHP for you to connect to (using PHP5s built-in libraries it seems) and then proceed to jump right over to the Javascript. I'm pretty sure that this functionality won't work outside of Mozilla, but it's still a pretty cool little hack for anyone who uses it. SOAP services (web services, for that matter) are growing more and more each day, and, thankfully, more and more companies are getting on the bandwagon about it and opening up APIs for their information to be accessed simply and easily...