I'm working on an abstraction on top of a network link, which is established by other means, the abstraction is only the "user" part of the link, not the provider. The provider can be a TCP socket, a UNIX socket, a pipe, or whatever can safely send a reliable stream of data. The user layer which I'm working on provides a "message" service, i.e. it sends and receives message packets, a message being (length, payload). It can compress and encrypt the payload. Basically, a Net::MsgLink object is created with a file descriptor, on which sysread() and syswrite() can be called, or an IO::Handle object (on which the same sysread/syswrite can be used). That's it. A simple abstraction, but very reusable. Raphael
