[Squeakland] collaborative uses

Thomas Oeding Thomas.Oeding at gmx.de
Wed Feb 25 21:45:10 PST 2004


Forward for Ned Konz <ned at bike-nomad.com>:


On Tuesday 24 February 2004 6:14 am, Randy Heiland wrote:

> I was just curious if there are any existing collaborative possibilities
> with Squeak?  This is a very open-ended question, I realize, but I'm
> interested in any/all aspects of it.  Well, I'm not into multiuser
> gaming.  I am curious about the possibility of squeakers being able to,
> say, obtain/display data from online instruments.  Or being able to
> build up a regional/national database of (local) measurements - similar
> to the "plot of temperatures" figure in Alan Kay's "Computers, Networks
> and Education" paper?

I am interested in this too. To this end, I wrote a Squeak plugin for the 
Spread group communications system (http://www.spread.org) ; you can get it 
from: 
http://map1.squeakfoundation.org/sm/package/f58f6558-ad7d-4a0a-b16b-6039a17fe9d3

Right now there is only the code for Unix systems (it works for me under 
Linux); it should be simple to port to other systems.

We will probably use this in the Microship project (http://microship.com) to 
make a distributed network of I/O points (sensors and actuators), as well as 
voice, video, etc. feeds across a network of boats.

Spread is very easy to use from Squeak. The idea is that a program subscribes 
to one or more 'groups' by name, and then it sees all the messages sent to 
that group (which can include messages when other programs join or leave the 
group). The messages can be arbitrary data, up to about 100K or so. So there 
needs to be a layer on top of Spread to do the actual handling of the 
messages, but it's really easy to use.

> More on the tech side, are protocols such as XML-RPC supported in
> Squeak?

Yes, there have been several such packages made.
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1399
http://bleu.west.spy.net/~dustin/projects/smalltalk-xmlrpc.xtp
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2288
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2694
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2926

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE



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