In my attempt to do soap requests from openacs, I used BabelFish as an example that we could easily put to use to automatically translate message strings if no translation is provided:
I needed to install tcldom, tclsoap and tcllib (all without any trouble at all). I read that it might be possible to use tdom instead of tcldom with some patch to tclsoap, but I couldn't find the code for that, but it might turn up somewhere.
All I then needed to do was:
package require SOAP
SOAP::configure -transport http -proxy {}
SOAP::create translate \
-proxy {http://services.xmethods.net:80/perl/soaplite.cgi} \
-uri {urn:xmethodsBabelFish#BabelFish} \
-params { translationmode string sourcedata string }
With this, a proc called "translate" is defined in the current namespace that then can be called with the specified parameters and will return the translated string:
set translation [translate de_en "Hallo Welt, Guten Tag"]
Since this is really as easy as it can get, I think we should think about integrating this in acs-lang, wrapped in a check for those packages that are needed.