Another comment on replacing the old SOAP functionality. I recently replaced an old SOAP webservice with HttpClient. I was just going to replicate the SOAP calls with HttpClient, but luckily I checked with the vendor and they also now offered a REST API equivalent of the their SOAP API, so it made it a bit easier because I didn't have to mess around with the SOAP messages.  It might be worth checking with your vendor before automatically going down the SOAP route.  You'll still need to do all the messy parsing of the return data, but in my case I could choose either XML or JSON.