Scarab includes a reference protocol implementing distributed objects, called Lightweight Distributed Objects (LDO). The various parts of the protocol are defined in the following documents:

Method Call Request Encoding as Objects

"Method Call REO" describes the way caller requests and responses are encoded as objects. It establishes a set of responsibilities between the caller and the callee: the responsibility of the caller to use the naming required by the callee, and the responsibility of callee to validate request parameters and coerce parameters as necessary.

Type naming and LDO Types

"LDO Types" describes [should describe] the format for representing data type names, the object types and encoding for common inter-language types, communicating surrogate or remote objects (proxies), and formats for several language or scheme-specific type names.

Binary Serialization

"LDO Binary Serialization" describes a compact, binary-encoded on-the-wire protocol.

XML Serialization

"LDO XML Serialization" describes a plaintext, XML-encoded on-the-wire protocol.