Yeah, I gotta one up this. jeffa and I chatted about this on the phone (welcome to Louisville, Jeff =) and I pointed out that he was lucky merlyn was infiltrating the Java types. Normally we leave it to him to shout HTTP eq instant_solution in these cases.

To add to what tilly is saying here when you are simply invoking a process on a remote box with real simple arguements or none at all why throw IPC and the like at the problem? And as he said, the benefit of HTTP is that you can use all kinds of handy toys with it. And most, if you want a slightly more strict data-markup, throw XML::Simple into the mix.

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)