Hessian and Burlap

At a lecture on the application framework Spring last friday I heard about two interesting protocols for accessing remote objects over HTTP: Hessian and Burlap. Burlap uses a restricted subset of XML whereas Burlap is binary. Both are devoloped by a company but publically specified and implemented as open source software. They are very easy to use. On the client side, all you have to do to access a remote HelloWorld object is something like:

HessianProxyFactory factory = new HessianProxyFactory();
String url = "http://www.foo.com/hessian/hello";
IHello hello = (IHello) factory.create(IHello.class, url);
System.out.println("hello says: " + hello.sayHello());

On the server side, there is a HessianServlet talking to the remote HelloWorld object that implements the IHello interface. That's all. I didn't try it out yet, at a first glance it looks nice, doesn't it? Since Spring supports these protocols, they could become widely used in the future, I guess.