(this work dates from February 2003)

This is a Plugin and supporting classes to allow Squeak to work with 
the Spread (http://www.spread.org) group communications system.

It is designed so that you can have background threads waiting for 
incoming messages without blocking all of Squeak.

I have only written the support code for Unix; it would be quite 
simple to port to other systems, especially if they have async file 
support like that in the Unix VM.

There are Spread libraries available for: C, Java, Perl, Ruby, Python, 
and now Squeak.

This is largely untested; I wanted to get it out in people's hands and 
see what further direction to move the interface in.

Received messages should probably be of several different kinds; what 
is returned now is pretty much the raw fields of the incoming Spread 
message, which vary in meaning depending on the type of message. I 
will probably be attacking that next.

I hope to get some kind of cross-language serialization (YAML, 
perhaps) going and then have a simple cross-language distributed 
object communications system.

The AsyncFile plugin served as an inspiration, guide, and source of 
code for the async part of this plugin.

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