The soap interface is not appropriate for scripting of tasks; it requires the generation of proxy-objects which must be instansiated and populated for even simple requests. It would be nice to have a simplified interface (SOAP, XML-RPC or both) that accepts base-types as arguments. I'd like to be able to do something like this (Python code, based on the confluence xmlrpc interface):

    srv = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy(crowdurl)
    token = srv.crowd1.login(user, pass)

    srv.crowd1.addUser(token, uname, passwd)
    srv.crowd1.addUserAttrib(token, uname, "email", email) 
    srv.crowd1.addUserToGroup(token, uname, group)