Forward for Ned Konz ned@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-6039a17f...

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