This is a very slippery slope, one whose borders delinate between remotely-separated objects being mirrors of each other and those where one side only has a handle on to the "real" object on the other end of the connection.

CORBA and SOAP are likely the most mature, well-supported cross-platform/cross-language architectures currently in use and development. Java's RMI standard is a good example of a language-specific solution to the problem. As far as I know, there isn't currently anything RMI-like for Perl, though emerging technologies such as POE may prove to be foundations upon which people choose to start developing such things.

--rjray