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.