Spread Toolkit

Infobox Software
name = The Spread Toolkit
developer = Spread Concepts LLC
latest_release_version = 4.0
latest_release_date = December 4 2006
released = 1993
status = Active
programming language = C
operating system = Cross-platform
genre = Group communication system, Peer to peer
license = The Spread Open-Source License
website = http://www.spread.org/

The Spread Toolkit is a computer software package that provides a high performance group communication system that is resilient to faults across local and wide area networks. Spread functions as a unified message bus for distributed applications, and provides highly tuned application-level multicast, group communication, and point to point support. Spread services range from reliable messaging to fully ordered messages with delivery guarantees.

The toolkit consists of a messaging server, and client libraries for many software development environments, including C/C++ libraries (with and without thread support), a Java Class to be used by applets or applications, and interfaces for Perl, Python, and Ruby. Additional interfaces for many other software environments have been provided by third parties.

In typical operation, each computer in a cluster runs its own instance of the Spread server, and client applications connect locally to that server process. The spread servers, in turn, communicate with each other to pass messages to subscriber applications. It can also be configured such that clients distributed across the network all communicate with a Spread server process on a single host.

The Spread Toolkit is developed by [http://www.spreadconcepts.com/ Spread Concepts LLC] , with much support by the [http://www.dsn.jhu.edu/ Distributed Systems and Networks Lab] (DSN) at Johns Hopkins University and the [http://www.ensl.cs.gwu.edu/ Experimental Networked Systems Lab] at George Washington University.

Partial funding was provided by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and The National Security Agency (NSA).

Bindings

Bindings for Spread Toolkit exist in the following languages/platforms:
*C++
** [http://www.savarese.com/software/ Sava Bindings for Spread]
*C#
** [http://www.spread.org/files/cspread.zip C# bindings and sample programs] by Darin Peshev
*Haskell
** [http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/hspread hspread]
*Lua
** [http://www.savarese.com/software/ Sava Bindings for Spread]
** [http://pobox.com/~taj.khattra/luaspread.html luaspread] by Taj Khattra
*Microsoft Excel
** [http://code.google.com/p/spread-excel/ spread-excel] by Jim Kleckner
*OCaml
** [http://ocamlspread.sourceforge.net/ OcamlSpread] (Early release, looking for maintainer)
*Perl
** [http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/dist/Spread Perl Spread]
** [http://www.savarese.com/software/ Sava Bindings for Spread]
*PHP
** [http://pecl.php.net/package/spread PECL::Spread] by George Schlossnagle and Rob Richards
*Python
** [http://www.python.org/other/spread/ Python binding] by Zope Team
** [http://www.savarese.com/software/ Sava Bindings for Spread]
*Ruby
** [http://rbspread.sourceforge.net/ rb_spread2]
** [http://www.savarese.com/software/ Sava Bindings for Spread]
*Squeak
** [http://bike-nomad.com/squeak/ Squeak Spread Plugin]
*Scheme
** [http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/eggs/spread.html spread.egg] by Felix Winkelmann
*TCL
** [http://wiki.tcl.tk/14139 Tcl interface to spread]

References

[http://www.spread.org Spread Toolkit Home Page]