Nathan Baker wrote: / ... > Is there a relatively painless way to wrap data and pass them to Ruby > in such a way that these data can then be serialized over the network? One option that sacrifices some speed in exchange for robustness is to wrap arbitrary binary data in a CDATA block within an XML data stream. This requires that the data be parsed, and it is slower than some other approaches, but it plays nice with a lot of the present infrastructure that understands XML database content. I assume you are speaking of a data block with no particular structure -- data that might be a raw binary stream. If the data could be expressed in plain-text, I would suggest something different. -- Paul Lutus http://www.arachnoid.com