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?
Just because the world is full of XML zealots does not mean that XDR (ONC RPC), NDR (DCE RPC) and others are dead. Neither of these makes you figure out how large the integer on host foo is (thats half the point).
I personally like the XDR standard (I can do without NDR and BER/DER).
Roman.
Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
