Lightweight interobject communication

While trying to build an item update system, I've noticed that there's no really usable way to communicate between two objects, especially if one of them resides in the inventory of the other.

I'd like to suggest these patterns:

llSendMessage(key destobject, int p1, string p2); // Send message to object

receive_msg(key srcobject, int p1, string p2) // Receiving event
{ ... }

Ideally, there should also be a function a la:

string llHandshake(key destobject, int p1, string p2);

This would however be a synchronous method and rely on receive_msg returning a value. To prevent a script lock, the sim would check whether receive_msg issued a return statement or not, and based on that return an empty string.

Thanks for considering.

Perceptive, aren't you
We've been screaming about better comms since beta... so far we got an email kludge and a crippled xml-rpc implementation, but no speedy, usable comms.

I gave XMLRPC an attempt, but if I can't tell the other object the channel key in an usable way, it's useless.

For what I want to do, I need a way to ask an inventory object a few questions (hoping that scripts do work on inventory objects).

good but not good enough. It should send a list instead of a string. I figure for large script systems the most data is lost translating data back and forth between string and lists.

llSendMessage(key destobject, integer p1, list p2); // Send message to object
receive_msg(key srcobject, integer p1, list p2)  // Receiving event
{ ... }