Have you read the book called the design and imlementation of
ConncurrentSmalltalk. It may give you
some interesting insights into ways of doing this stuff

-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Logan <patrickl at servio.gemstone.com>
To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu <squeak at cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: Tuesday, October 13, 1998 5:40 PM
Subject: Distributed and concurrent Squeak


>
>    I would like to create an application which runs seamlessly across
>    multiple machines and platforms, but it's too hard because the
>    communication and coordination is a bitch.
>
>    Possible solution:
>     Expand the "image" concept to encompass an
>     entire "world".
>
>    Not having access to a Sun platform I've never run Self, but the
>    descriptions I've read make it sound like Self did something like
>    this, at least for the development "half" (the other half being
>    the deployment "half").
>
>    Basically I want collaboration with little pain and lots of gain.
>
>Another approach is the simple message passing approach. This would be
>interesting to consider, given Alan Key's recent email to this list
>about "messages" vis-a-vis "objects".
>
>Consider the programming language named Erlang from Ericsson. It is a
>concurrent and distributed language with no shared memory. All
>communication is by sending high-level messages. Receivers can pattern
>match on messages with time outs, etc. What Erlang calls "processes"
>can be linked to each other for high level process control and
>reliability.
>
>There are several production-quality communications programs built
>with hundreds of thousands of lines of Erlang code, so it seems to
>have some practicality, which may meet the "lots of gain"
>requirement. The simplicity of it seems to meet the "little pain"
>requirement.
>
>Another approach is the Linda model which provides more of a "shared
>name space". The Erlang approach provides a name space of processes
>where Linda provides a name space of messages. Gemstone provides a
>model of the "worldwide multi-user image" but that is a much more
>complicated approach for the implementor.
>
>--
>Patrick Logan                 mailto:patrickl at gemstone.com
>Voice 503-533-3365            Fax   503-629-8556
>Gemstone Systems, Inc         http://www.gemstone.com
>
>"I am not a Church numeral; I am a free variable!"
>