XML-RPC is a very handy little standard. It's straightforward, lightweight, and implementations exist for pretty much every language out there. One thing I've found a bit lacking with it however is that it's kind of a pain to deal with objects. The standard itself supports some very basic types like strings, integers, arrays, and structures. But there's no way of handling more complicated types. A project I've been working on involves manipulating server-side objects over a network connection, so I figured that XML-RPC would be a good place to start. I believe I've come up with a good way of allowing clients to build proxies for server side objects, while still being compatible with regular XML-RPC implementations. I've been experimenting a little bit with an XML-RPC server written in Python, and a JavaScript client (using jsolait). I considered adding a new type of parameter (<object>?), but decided against it since it would break older implementations. Instead, the client and server agree to a few conventions:

• A two-tuple whose first element begins with "types." should be interpreted as a reference to an object on the server, where the first element specifies the type of the object, and the second is a unique identifier for that object.
• The server exposes object methods as functions with names of the format "typeMethods.typeName.methodName".

When the client receives a two-tuple object reference, it can now look in the list of methods supported by the server, and create a new object with wrappers for all the appropriate class methods bound to that object. For example, the following python code: class MyClass: def doSomething(self, x, y): pass def makeObj(): return MyClass() would be exposed as these XML-RPC functions: makeObj() /* returns an object reference: ("types.MyClass", objectId) */ typeMethods.MyClass.doSomething(objectRef, x, y) /* objectRef should be ("types.MyClass", objectId) */ When the client sees a two-tuple of the form ("types.MyClass", objectId), it can create a new object along the lines of: var o = { "objectId" = objectId, "typeName" = "types.MyClass", "doSomething" = function(x,y) { typeMethods.MyClass.doSomething([this.typeName, this.objectId], x, y); }} (JavaScript isn't my strong suit, so I appologize if this isn't exactly right. Hopefully the intent is clear!) So now you've got a first-class object in your client, with methods that behave just like you would expect! You can now write: o.doSomething(x,y); instead of something along the lines of: serverproxy.MyClass_doSomething(objectId, x, y); Using the system.listMethods() function to get a list of all methods supported by the server enables you to bind all of a type's methods to an object. Generating objectId's is application specific, so I won't go into that here. I would like to see a generic way for a user to extend Python's SimpleXMLRPCServer to marshall and unmarshall new data types. The pickle methods (__getstate__, __setstate__) seem promising, but those are intended to serialize the entire representation of an object, not simply a reference to the object.