[Chicago-talk] Perl distributed objects?

[Jim Thomason]

Boy, I don't even know exactly what to ask here...so bear with me.

Is there a CPAN equivalent to Cocoa's Distributed Objects system? The
objective-c guys in the room are hopefully already nodding and saying
"Yes, that'd be neat." For the rest, I'll try and elaborate.

Basically, distributed objects allows for transparent networking. You
vend out an object for remote access, then a client comes along and
connects up and grabs a proxy to that vended object. The client and
server can then interact with each other as if they were local
objects.

Here's an example, say I have this object that does something:

[anObject doSomething:withMe];

And I want to change my code so anObject is actually sitting on a
remote server. To do that, I'd need to change this code to say:

[anObject doSomething:withMe];

(obviously there's some other bits in terms of setting up the object
that I'm omitting).

But do we perl folks already have an equivalent generic module like
this hanging around on CPAN? Other than searching for "distributed
objects", I don't have an equivalent term to search for.

Something that would allow me to just type in:

$object->do_something($withMe);

and just work, regardless of whether $object is sitting in my program
or my thread or on my machine. While I wouldn't necessarily mind
re-inventing this particular wheel, it's also not exactly something
I'm jumping at.

Any suggestions?

-Jim.....