Since it can be done, it seems the real question is whether the Squeak 
     programmer who just wants to provide a distributed solution in some 
     problem domain be responsible developing such a protocol or a generic 
     one should be provided by Squeak. It seems to me that the programmer 
     should concentrate on the problem domain.
     
     Stephen Pair said that "this cuts right to the core of the problem 
     with current OO environments and distributed objects". I believe that 
     this is true and that anything that Squeak can do to make it easy for 
     the developer of distributed applications will be a great advantage to 
     the Squeak community.
     
     Can and should such a generic mechanism be included in Squeak?
     
     Jerome


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: Generic Bridges
Author:  Stephen Pope <stp at create.ucsb.edu> at INTERNET
Date:    12/9/98 10:24 PM


Jerome Garcia 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.
     
This is pretty easy if your protocol allows for passing MessageNotUnderstood 
between images, and for passing stringified class descriptions. You could have a
simple method for passing a class description and the class's accessors and 
storeOn/readFrom methods
     
-- 
stp
     
        Stephen Travis Pope
        stp at create.ucsb.edu -- http://www.create.ucsb.edu/~stp/