I guess anyone that has developed an n-tier application has come up against the question of how to communicate between the physical tiers of their application. Web Services are pretty popular, but if you don't need to expose your middle tier to other applications - if your middle tier is only ever going to be called by the presentation layer tier of your application do you really need all that standards overhead? I have used web services for some things and Binary remoting over http for others. Up ......
I now have a new job, which is part of the reason I have been so quiet on the blog front lately.
The other factor is that I have been working at a client site where the Proxy/Firewall blocks most javascript and I was not able to post anything during the day.