I'm trying to get an app working as an XML-RPC client.  But I'm having trouble getting it to speak to a PHP implementation of XML-RPC on the server side (the incutio library, to be specific).  I've verified that the server works with a PHP client.

For testing purposes, the method in question just takes a string and returns an uppercase version of it.  I've tested it with PHP and Python clients and it works fine.

But when I use it from within Processing, I get this message:

Fatal error parsing XML: org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: expected Element

I take it that this means the returned XML isn't well-formed.  I don't think this is correct, though -- it works fine with these other clients.  Any ideas?

A second question: I don't have a Java background.  Is there an easy way to serialize or otherwise inspect the contents of an arbitrary object?  I'd like to be able to have a peek inside the object returned by the XML-RPC call, since the remote method I ultimately need to call is going to return a bunch of nested data structures, and I don't have a very good idea of what they're going to come back as in Processing (hashtables, I imagine -- enumerating their properties and methods would be a big help, though).