Fundamentally, Web services is nothing more than a set of distributed computing specifications that describe how to marshal objects from one endpoint to another over a particular transport. Many of the specifications, for example the Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) describe the types and message structure of a Web service.

Successful applications in Smalltalk rely on object models that accurately represent a specific user domain. Therefore, the VA Smalltalk Web services platform was designed to automatically serialize and deserialize objects based upon the (WSDL) description of a service.

To support automatic object conversion, new content handlers were created for usage with the XML SAX parser. With a minimal amount of mapping for complex types, users will be able to work with objects from their business domain.