I was just using eval loosely. The eval I particularly meant is that an __init__ is run for classes with a .__getinitargs__ method defined [1]. And I guess json et al. is the reasonable answer I should have expected. I was hoping for something that mimicked the functionality of pickle but maybe signed the information so that it would be safe to use across a network.

http://docs.python.org/2/library/pickle.html#object.__getini...