By respecting the Smalltalk messaging semantic the service class allows the application to be unaware that it is working with a Web service. From the application's perspective, messages to Web services and their arguments require no special formatting. Consider the following code example:

Using the framework, a service wraps the existing implementation of the rating engine. The service interface would be formally defined using WSDL. The application would ask the container for the object to assign to the variable aRatingEngine using the serviceNamed:inNamespace: API. Messaging is only the first step in adherence to the Smalltalk language semantics. Exception handling is also a a primary consideration.

The Web services framework will automatically convert SOAP faults into exceptions and signal them. The code example from above could be rewritten as follows: