[sumtechguy]

Most of my issues with distributed came from poor over the wire interop. Very crappy libs that would serialize and deserialize in amazingly bad ways. Or some descriptor lang (like idl). Then God help you if you had two different CPU/compiler platforms on both sides. JSON has in many ways filled the niche that XML was doing and RPC before it. But I had to spend so much time writing glue code just so both sides could send/recv that data.