[Spread-users] Squeak Smalltalk Plugin for Spread available

[Yair Amir]

Hi Ned,

Great stuff.
Just to make sure - if you want to work with several threads that
concurrently make calls to the Spread library, you have to make sure
you link with libtsp and not with libsp, otherwise it might not work.
libtsp is a version of libsp that supports threading (and incurs just
a bit of overhead). Exact same interface.

  Cheers,

  :) Yair.
  
Ned> A preliminary version of a Squeak (Smalltalk) interface to the Spread 
Ned> library under Unix (libsp) is available at:

Ned> http://bike-nomad.com/squeak/

Ned> From my announcement to the Squeak-dev mailing list:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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