Hi Folks: Some suggestions. 1) Look at SOAP. Under Perl, SOAP::Lite is a good module for handling IPC/RMI type work. I have used it in a commercial project before with excellent results. (http://search.cpan.org/author/KULCHENKO/SOAP-Lite-0.55/lib/SOAP/Lite.pm) 2) If you wish to call other language routines from within Perl, look at the Inline modules (http://search.cpan.org/author/INGY/Inline-0.44/Inline.pod) 3) To help define the API, try to use a simple XML document as a method to encode the arguments to the function, so as to enable simple inter-language calls. This may not be possible or realistic for internals, or performance sensitive areas. I have not had any problems with XML parsing under Perl using XML::Simple, though I am using neither DTD nor Schema for the documents (they are not always necessary, especially if you control the generation of the documents). (see http://search.cpan.org/author/GRANTM/XML-Simple-2.03/lib/XML/Simple.pm for XML::Simple) Joe -- Joseph Landman, Ph.D Scalable Informatics LLC email: landman at scalableinformatics.com web: http://scalableinformatics.com phone: +1 734 612 4615