Spoon progress 2007-05-17: online module searches with Naiad

[Craig Latta]

Hi--

     I've successfully performed a search for online modules with Naiad
(Spoon's module system).

     The links in the initial Spoon welcome webpage now include a
"search" link. When you click on it, you get a page with a form on it,
with an input field for each module attribute (id, name, author,
summary, description, version, license, date, and website) and a
"submit" button. You can fill in each field with a pattern to match
(e.g., "*ello*orld").

     When you click the button, the local Spoon system creates a filter
from the form's information, and collects descriptions of all the
matching modules from all the module-serving remote Spoon systems that
are online at the time. From these descriptions, the local Spoon system
creates a webpage summarizing each matching module, including Naiad
links. When you click on a Naiad link for a module, the module is
installed from a system serving it.

     Any Spoon system can register itself as a module-serving system by
contacting one of several root servers, whose contact information is
hardwired into the release (perhaps supplemented in the future by info
from public web search engines).

     For offline sources of modules, I imagine authors will create web
pages that get indexed by public web search engines. Clients would then
simply download entire object memory snapshots and install modules from
them locally later, without using the wide-area network.

     The set of Naiad module servers currently consists of a single
machine (metronome.netjam.org), with one trivial module available. Soon
I'll be looking for volunteers who can make additional machines
available to join the set. In general, I imagine there will be a handful
of well-connected, always-on machines that can serve most of the popular
modules, and many personal machines which intermittently serve
works-in-progress.

     A new release is coming soon, so you can try all this out. Once
this stuff is working for everyone, we can distribute the task of
creating modules for turning Spoon into something widely useful (e.g.,
"Squeak 4").


     thanks again,

-C

-- 
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]