In order to send and receive objects over a network, the objects must be prepared for archiving and dearchiving as described in Saving and Loading Individual Objects the section called “Saving and Loading Individual Objects”. Read that section first to be certain that your objects will be properly encoded and decoded.

When sending an instance over the network, breve recreates the instance on the server machine. It recreates the object and the state of all of its variables, except that variables of type object and pointer can not be automatically maintained without special treatment. The reason for this and the solution are described in Saving and Loading Individual Objects the section called “Saving and Loading Individual Objects”.

To send an object over the network, use the Object method send-over-network with the server computer's hostname and port:

        response = ( self send-over-network to "myOtherComputer" on 31337 ).

The function send-over-network may return a response object if one is sent by the server. This is described in more detail below.

If a NetworkServer receives an instance upload from another host, it dearchives the object, adds it to the simulation, then informs the controller of the newly added object with the callback method accept-upload. You should implement your own accept-upload with the following method declaration:

        + to accept-upload of-instance newInstance (object) from-host clientHostname (string).

The newly created instance, and the hostname which sent the instance are passed in as arguments. This method may optionally return an object which will be encoded and returned to the host which initiated the network connection.