I'm playing around with a way to expose Windows COM object via XML-RPC (or something else).

Let me explain:

My first thought was to write an XML-RPC API to expose the MAPI COM object and it's methods. ... So my current question, can anyone think of an existing technology or library that will allow me to expose these COM objects in a way that could be used by other platforms/languages. Corba (FNORB), ILU, PYRO?

Or am I really just going a little crazy?

You might want to take a look at MS' SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) spec - it's not fully baked yet, but it basically takes xml-rpc several steps further, allowing you to communicate with SOAP-enabled objects (COM or otherwise) using XML over HTTP. We in Zope-land are keeping a close eye on this, as publishing objects via HTTP is the core idea of Zope already. Once the SOAP spec is fleshed out enough to implement in Python, it will probably be laugably easy not only to implement SOAP objects in Python but also to wrap most any existing COM objects as SOAP-aware objects.

If you're interested, the current spec is at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/xml/general/soaptemplate.asp

Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com