Casbah is a distributed application development environment slanted
towards scripting, like Python, Perl, and Tcl. The core Casbah
components are support for multiple languages, a virtual/distributed,
hierarchical data-store (URL space), and the software and protocols
for distributing this between processes and systems.
The latter component is the most relevant to this thread and is called
Lightweight Distributed Objects (LDO). LDO includes specifications
for serializing objects using XML or a binary format, for encoding
remote requests as objects to be serialized and transmitted, and an
API for using the remote requests and serialization.
LDO is patterned after Apple's (nee NeXT's) Distributed Objects used
in MacOS X Server and, before that, in OpenStep and NextStep. LDO is
not Casbah-specifc and is intended to be reusable outside of Casbah.
LDO is nearing a 0.1 release and has implementations available in
Python and Perl. There is not an LDO page on the Casbah site yet,
that's a goal for 0.1 :-). The source and specifications are available
in CVS and some documentation is available on the Casbah Swiki:
<http://www.ntlug.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/LDO/>
<http://152.2.205.21/casbah.311>
The CVSROOT for Casbah is
CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@ntlug.org:/home/cbsrc/cvsroot
the password is `anonymous' and the module is `LDO'.
-- Ken MacLeod
ken@bitsko.slc.ut.us
P.S. LDO was recently listed in the XML Resource Guide on XML.com
using it's old name Lotos, under the category XML Serialization.