Squeak networking (was "UDP for Win32 Squeak")

Craig Latta Craig.Latta at NetJam.ORG
Wed Jul 14 09:46:04 UTC 1999


	Apologies for the response delay (your message was from 29 April).

> ...your [Correspondents] approach is quite a bit different from
> the general Squeak version so far and since the Unix VM does
> also implement UDP sockets in a reasonable (and compatible)
> way I'm leaning more towards this kind of implementation.

	This feels to me like "Well, your automobile design is interesting, but there's no place for the horse."

	Yes, my approach is very different from the framework currently in Squeak. I prefer it; that's why I bothered to port it to Squeak at all. Here's why I prefer it:

- The current framework implements timeouts and synchronization by polling. There is absolutely no reason to do this, and it exacts a severe performance penalty. The framework I wrote uses Smalltalk semaphores; it's faster, easier to understand, and applications written with it are easier to debug.

- The framework I wrote supports servers with multiple clients.

- The framework I wrote maps directly to the BSD sockets interface, which is now used by ALL of the current host operating systems. The Mac used to have a different interface, but Apple have dropped it (as I have mentioned on this list numerous times before).

- The framework I wrote integrates all external resources (sockets, MIDI ports, serial ports, disk files, etc.) with streams. I think the design led to a better primitive interface than the current framework as a result. I also think it makes things like streaming audio much more straightforward.

	If the UDP support design is not open to change at the moment, I'd at least like to get some feedback from Central on the Correspondents framework as a whole.


	thanks,

-C


--
Craig Latta
composer and computer scientist
craig.latta at netjam.org
www.netjam.org
latta at interval.com
"Instant monotony! Just ad nauseam."





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list