Well, this may be a dumb response ;->
But shouldn't it be possible, at least with a bit of care,
to do so already?  After all, a class is an object, class
definition is a message send to another object, which will
ultimately be one in the receiving image...
I'd think you'd need some sort of handler to detect:
class name existence
class "shape" [ideally behavioral as well as structural]
and a clean renaming (or other name-space) convention to
	handle cases where 1 passes and 2 fails...

Comments, anyone?  Am I missing something?

Bill

At 01:19 PM 12/9/98 -0800, you wrote:
>     This may be a dumb question but I would like to know what it would 
>     take to add the capability to not only pass objects and messages 
>     between Smalltalk images but be able to pass them to images which do 
>     not contain the class definitions for those objects. Basically, it 
>     seems to me that it would be nice to be able to do the following:
>     
>     1. Pass a class definition to an image.
>     2. Send that image instances of the class or ask it to instantiate 
>     some and initialize them.
>     3. Do something with the class and instances.
>     4. Remove the class definition and instances from the image.
>     
>     I would like to be able to avoid the necessity of having the class 
>     definitions permanently in all of the images of a distrubuted system. 
>     If this can already be done, I would love to know how.
>     
>     Jerome
>     
>     jegarcia at adventurousmind.com
>
>
>______________________________ Reply Separator
_________________________________
>Subject: Re: Generic Bridges
>Author:  Stephen Pope <stp at create.ucsb.edu> at INTERNET
>Date:    12/9/98 7:38 PM
>
>
>C. Keith Ray wrote:
>> Does anyone on this mailing list have experience implementing distributed 
>> objects in smalltalk?
>> 
>> It seems those techniques could also allow calling into specific squeak 
>> objects from outside squeak.
>     
>I've done it several times for various dialects of Smalltalk. It's pretty 
>trivial to write a simple socket-based protocol for passing objects and
messages
>between Smalltalk images, or between Smalltalk and C/C++. The solutions can 
>range from a very lightweight packet protocol to full-blown mini-ORBs.
Squeak's 
>provision of simple socket I/O makes it even easier. The fact that
primitives 
>can signal Smalltalk semaphores makes call-ins to Smalltalk from outside a 
>breeze (e.g., look at the [non-polling] MIDI input code in Siren).
>     
>-- 
>stp
>     
>        Stephen Travis Pope
>        stp at create.ucsb.edu -- http://www.create.ucsb.edu/~stp/
>     
>
>
>