I've just been enlightened by a friend of mine who explained to me that binary RPC is still alive and kicking: http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/ http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/static/thrift-20070401.pdf and, of course, nothing in CS is complete these days unless there's somebody at Google working on it: http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers
Am I totally missing something or hasn't been the binary RPC of that style been dead ever since SUNRPC? Hasn't the eulogy been delivered by CORBA? Haven't folks realized that S-exprs are really quite good for data serialization in the heterogeneous environments (especially when they are called JSON) and you really shouldn't be made to figure out how large is the integer on a host foo? Thanks, Roman.