Jim, Amos, thank you very much for your immediate answers. Things have become less foggy already. One thing that took me quite long to figure out, even though it's explicitely mentioned in the docs is that the Publisher explicitely extracts the argument names from the code objects of python functions. Isn't it a little dangerous to rely that much on python's internals. (Of course I see that solutions which stay inside the language's boundaries are much clumsier, e.g. would force all published functions to be f(**args). I don't want to start an extensive thread with this question, maybe it has been discussed in the bobo list already.. regards, stefan