. .


IM 27: Xtreams at Smalltalk Solutions 2011 (AAC)

May 1, 2011 10:52:29.048

Welcome to episode 27 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, and David Buck. This week's podcast was recorded at Smalltalk Solutions 2011 - it's Michael Lucas-Smith and Martin Kobetic talking about Xtreams:.

Xtreams is a generalized stream/iterator framework providing simple, unified API for reading from different kinds of sources and writing into different kinds of destinations (Collections, Sockets, Files, Pipes, etc). Streams themselves can be sources or destinations as well. This allows to stack streams on top of each other. At the bottom of such stack is some kind of non-stream (e.g. a collection), we will call it a terminal. Directly above that is a specialized stream providing a streaming facade over the terminal. The rest of the streams in the stack we'll call transforms. Their primary purpose is to perform some kind of transformation on the elements that are passing through. Application code interacts with the top stream of the stack the same way it would with any other stream (or stream stack) producing/consuming the same elements. The goal of the framework is to provide consistent behavior between different stacks so that the application can treat them the same way regardless of what exactly is the ultimate source or destination. For example if the application code analyzes binary data, it should be able to treat the source stream the same way if it is a simple stream over a ByteArray or if it is a stack that provides contents of a specific binary part of a mulitpart, gziped, chunked HTTP response from a socket. Xtreams is an attempt to achieve this goal in a scalable and efficient manner.

If you would prefer to watch the video, scroll down to the embed. The talk was over 90 minutes long, so I've split the audio podcast in half - part two will be out next week..





Xtreams, by Michael Lucas-Smith and Martin Kobetic from Smalltalk Industry Council on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: , ,

[im27.m4a ( Size: 28496785 )]

posted by James Robertson

 Share Tweet This