Naiad is Spoon's module system. For every Naiad module, there can be a webpage describing it and providing something for Google to crawl. This is the basis of a discovery system for Naiad modules. It includes...

a well-known master Naiad module pages ID (so that one can search the web for all Naiad module pages)
the module's name
the module's author's ID (so that one can search the web for the pages of the modules by that author)
the module's ID
a description of the module's content
the module's current version
the module's latest timestamp
the module's tags
the IDs of the module's prerequisite modules (for which one may search the web)
one or more installation links. When clicked, an installation link hits a webserver running in a local Spoon system. The link contains an encoded hostname and port for a remote Spoon system which actually serves the module.

      I created the first Naiad module page, for the "fundamental constants" module. It was indexed by Google a few hours later.

      There are several different commands: for quitting Spoon, making a snapshot, installing modules, and so on. A module installation command contains the hostname and port of the machine serving the module, and the module's UUID. The receiving Spoon system uses this information to create a remote-messaging connection between itself and the serving system; the two systems then synchronize themselves via remote messages.

      Note that no files are used to transfer behavior between systems. This is a departure from Smalltalk's traditional "fileout" mechanism.

      (The above applies to Spoon 1a13 and later.)

Tuesday, 12 July 2011