gSOAP lives!
alrighty then! i got gSOAP to work on FreeBSD! in the Makefile under gsoap-2.5/soapcpp2/wsdl i found the
($SOAP_CPP_SRC) target only looked like this:

$(SOAP_CPP_SRC) : $(SOAPHEADER)
$(SOAP) $(SOAP_FLAGS) $<

and i just substituted '$(SOAPHEADER)' in place of the '$<' and the compile went on successfully.

i wonder if i could make Apache Axis work too? i could probably do my thesis as an all-C++ thing, but it WOULD be neat to see if i can write my services in C++ and do some clients in Java/Axis, to see just how well SOAP as a protocol delivers on its promise of interoperability. not to mention i can add an additional linux box into the mix and try different combos of platform/OS+programming language and see how interoperable they all are.

i wonder if anybody would be interested if i wrote an article on gSOAP? i mean, all the hype is on Java web services these days, nobody seems to think that maybe if you needed your program to access a platform-dependent resource -- whatever THAT might be, could be legacy native code, could be hardware-specific info, could be your home electrical system, or your proverbial "neighborhood nuclear reactor" -- you would need go closer to the machine than Java can let you, and go down to a lower level language like C or C++. anyway, if i'm ever going to write a true-blue tech article about it, I'll Write It When I Write It (tm) ;-)