Hi William.

Well, welcome! I'm just a lurker on this list, but I don't think it 
makes my answer any less valid :-).

William G. Davis wrote:
> Hi everyone.
> 
> I'm somewhat new to Squeak and to Smalltalk in
> general. I want to know what the preferred mechanism
> is for sending messages over a network to some remote
> object.
> 
> Is there any special way of doing this? I looked in
> Network-ObjectSocket, but it's undocumented and
> doesn't seem functional.

Firstly, there's never a preferred way to do anything in Squeak. There 
are always lots of options, some better and some works. Just try a few 
and see what works.

Also, the best source of information is definitely 
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/Squeak.

rST (remote Smalltalk) is a remote-invocation mechanism. Not sure if it 
works with the latest Squeak version though. 
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2288

SOAP - if you're feeling twisted enough, you can try using this obscure 
protocol. http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1399

I recommend going through the links available on those two pages too. If 
you find something interesting, remember to add it to the wiki too! 
Wikis are great things.

Otherwise you can try mis-using a object repository such as GOODS or 
Magma. These usually communicate (afaik?) using TCP/IP, so perhaps they 
also have some synchronisation capabilities to communicate between 
remote objects? You'll have to research this yourself.

There are also just plain Sockets. Fire up the Squeak image and look at 
the class documentation (for "Socket") if it exists, or search for it on 
the wiki. There's also enough example code to look at in a standard image.

Finally, my own framework (DPON) is meant to be the ultimate and perfect 
solution for what you want, but it doesn't work yet and won't be working 
for the next decade at the rate its progressing.

Mikevdg.