I've just been reading about Spread <http://www.spread.org/>, which is 
described by its authors as:

"Spread is a toolkit that provides a high performance messaging 
service that is resilient to faults across external or internal 
networks. Spread functions as a unified message bus for distributed 
applications, and provides highly tuned application-level multicast 
and group communication support. Spread services range from reliable 
message passing to fully ordered messages with delivery guarantees, 
even in case of computer failures and network partitions."

It seems to me that this could be useful for a number of applications 
in the Squeak world, as well.

Its C API is quite simple, and provides for a number of different 
kinds of reliability and ordering guarantees. Individual messages can 
be up to about 100K in size, but they can be reliably ordered.

Notifications are available on members leaving a group (whether by 
disconnection or by choice).

They have a polling function that could be called from the Squeak aio 
framework.

There are currently interfaces for C, Perl, Python, Java, and Ruby.

I'm wondering whether there is any interest in this package or if 
anyone has done any work on making a Spread plugin.

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