Erlang deamon question

[Nicholas Frechette]

Hi,
Supposed I had a single erlang application running as a deamon/service in a
VM.
What would be the best way to communicate with it with a command line
application, keeping in mind I could have any number of them running at the
same time.
I am under the impression that I cannot reuse the built in erlang node
communication protocol (erl -name foobar) and rpc:call mainly because I
would have to generate random names for my client applications every time it
is ran, and that could pollute the atom pool of the service. Note also that
I can trust the clients and am not concerned about security here.

I presume I am stuck implementing a socket based rpc module? Is there
something already done for this in erlang? I really would love to just reuse
erlang terms in my arguments/return values. I am unlikely to have clients in
other languages but cross language usage could be a plus.

Thoughts?
Nicholas