I may have to have my Perl/Catalyst-based app talk to a service that currently only speaks the language of "Spring's HTTP invoker":

Spring's HTTP invoker. Spring provides a special remoting strategy which allows for Java serialization via HTTP, supporting any Java interface (just like the RMI invoker).

I was wondering if anyone had any experience doing something crazy like this, and what the best approach would be.

I assume that writing some Java, and embedding a JVM to handle it via Inline::Java or Java::Import could be done fairly easily (for easily involving me coding Java - blech). But I really think the httpd's are big enough as it is...

Alternatively, I could reverse-engineer the bits of the protocol I need and handle the deserialization of the objects in perl.

Any brilliant insights?