Remote object management is a key element in dis- tributed and collaborative information retrieval, peer-to- peer systems and agent oriented programming. In existing implementations the communication and parsing overhead represents a significant fraction of the overall latency time in information retrieval tasks. Furthermore, existing archi- tectures are composed of several software layers with po- tential version conflicts.

In this paper, we present SPyRO (Simple Python Re- mote Objects) which is a Python Remote Object Manage- ment System developed to provide transparent and translu- cent remote object access. The transparent mode is de- signed to create easily distributed applications supporting code mobility [5] in Python programming language, whilst the translucent mode is designed to provide total control over remote calls, and allow access from other program- ming languages.

To lower the communication latency, the connection is stateless, local objects and remote calls are not aware of the connection state. The protocol uses several marshal for- mats to communicate between peers, trying to maximize the homogeneity in a heterogeneous network.

To support our claims we present results showing per- formance improvements of about 10 times when comparing with state of the art marshalling formats based on XML.