Hm. I desperately need to fix this ad-hoc RPC* mechanism I've created with something more standardised. The only problem is which standard?

There's CORBA, SOAP, DCOM, RMI, SunRPC, etc., which all have their pluses and minuses. The problem is that each one has what appears to be a fatal negative for this project. Grr.

*RPC = remote procedure call. This allows parts of a program to run on a different machine in a way that is (ideally) transparent to the programmer.