I've used web services several times, but in the "serialized objects" style, and it worked. The alternatives were either that or a custom pipe-separated format

I've used web services several times, but in the "serialized objects" style, and it worked. The alternatives were either that or a custom pipe-separated format. I'll take serialized objects over XML all day. Prior to this discussion, I wasn't aware of JSON on REST, I guess I should catch up a bit- I live in an awful legacy-app development world, which we need to expose on a crumbling tower of VB6 and .NET apps that interact with it externally - VB6 is the "new" part btw, the old part is an old SUN technology called FORTE 4GL UDS.