D-BUS for Network RPC

[Stephen J. Scheck]

Hello,

I've read the D-BUS tutorial and know that it is designed and optimized
for local IPC, but I'm wondering how suitable it would be as a general
network RPC stack for light-weight applications. Specifically, I'm
wondering:

- How does the design and architecture of D-BUS make it optimized for 
  local use, and thus would make it unsuitable/inefficient for network 
  RPC? Is there any reason why it wouldn't make a good candidate for
  simple and light-weight network RPC applications?

- How stable/tested is the TCP transport?

- How difficult would it be to make the TCP transport work with   
  external security layers like IPsec or SSL/TLS? Could these
  be configured easily and transparently to wrap a D-BUS TCP connection
  or would modifications be necessary to D-BUS? And how would they 
  interact, if at all, with the SASL authentication used by D-BUS?

- Is there any other documentation or examples for the TCP transport? 
  The docs don't seem to specify the address format for TCP transport.

Basically, I'm looking for a simple, light-weight, and secure method to
make low-volume network RPC calls between hosts. D-BUS seems to fit the
bill if the TCP transport is stable and some security mechanism can
wrapped around it. I'm also looking at CORBA/Orbit, which seems too
complex, and Sun/ONC RPC, which seems a little dated. And I don't want
to use any of the XML-based RPC protocols (SOAP, XML-RPC), since they
only seem to be implemented on top of HTTP and I don't want to have to
run a full-fledged HTTP server for simple RPC support.

Comments?

Regards,

-sjs