I looked at SOAP, thinking it might solve all my problems but SOAP seemed to me at the time to be for 1 shot remote calls. You send some data, you get some data back. You don't get an object that you can then call methods on just like any other object that your program uses. The data that comes back is just hashes and arrays etc, no objects.

Of course you could then wrap up the data that came back in an object and call methods on it, which is basically what I was doing except I wasn't using SOAP to transmit the arguments and results of the function calls. The other difference is that SOAP doesn't have persistent connections so the server keeps having to save and restore the object from a database every time you call a method on it. The system I wrote maintains 1 process for every connection to it. Not ideal in some situations but exactly what I needed for my situation. Possibly more like J2EE, but I coudn't be sure about that.