A communications framework operable to support remote method invocation in a distributed object environment. The communications framework supporting a base class having an interface definition for a virtual query_op method, the interface definition specifying that the query_op method accepts a reference to a specifier for an operation to be performed, and that the query_op method returns a reference to a dispatch function to be invoked to perform the operation provided as an argument to an invocation of the query_op method, wherein the dispatch function accepts as arguments a reference to a target object on which to perform the operation and a reference to an object containing a list of values passed to and returned from the operation. A target object derives from the base class and provides an implementation for the query_op method. Other systems and methods are disclosed.