Patent ID: 7281207

Claim:
A method of exchanging a serialized object over a network, the method comprising: serializing an object, the serialized object comprising: Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) envelope relating to the object, wherein the SOAP envelope defines an overall framework; a data structure (“datastruct”) element representative of a data structure of the object, the datastruct element having a pair of datastruct tags, wherein the datastruct tags identify the datastruct element; and contents of the datastruct between the datastruct tags, the contents comprising one or more data parameter elements representative of one or more data parameters of the object's data structure, each parameter element having a pair of parameter tags associated therewith, wherein each pair of parameter tags identifies a parameter element with which the pair of tags is associated, each parameter element having associated data between the parameter tags, wherein the datastruct element and the contents are contained within the SOAP envelope, wherein the datastruct element and its contents are encoded using XML; inserting the serialized object into the body of a message for transmission to a destination entity over a network; and transmitting the message to the destination entity over the network for receipt, parsing, and deserialization of the object by the destination entity.