[ultimape]

I've been actively staying away from CORBA myself.

Back in college, we tried our hand at using Ice http://www.zeroc.com/iceVsCorba.html and it seemed to do the trick.

Still, it does assume that both parties have access to the template generated by ice - thus going back to the issues surrounding needing a sort of schema.

That being said, there does seem to be options for interacting using json: http://ice2rest.make-it-app.com/ and as of 3.3.1 it apparently supports Google's Protocol Buffers for flexibility.