About Spencer Plus
 
        In the fall semester of my Sophomore year at The Johns Hopkins University I took a course called Distributed Systems.  It was very hard and required an extra month and half past the regular semester to finish all of the class work.  I would highly recomend the course to all CS majors at the school, just wait until later than your Sophomore year to take it.  One of the things the class exposed me to was Spread, a wide area group communication toolkit developed by the Center for Networking and Distributed Systems.  It is so reliable and easy to implement, of course I immediately thought I could apply it to Spencer to enhance my communication program.  Unfortunately, I had to write a very large project, creating a distributed mail server, that took up all of my time.  Now with the small time available to me between the end of Intersession and the start of the spring semester I have created Spencer Plus...


About Spencer

        I remember the day like it was yesterday.  Wait, it was yesterday.  I was sitting in the fourth row of Shaffer 3 during my Intermediate Java class (600.121) and Dr. Wilson began lecturing about Client/Server progamming in Java.  A full 24 hours later and I am still baffled by how simple it is to connect two programs over the Internet.  As many of you know I am constantly amazed by computers and the Internet.  At any given moment my computer is running a web server, an FTP server, an IRC server, a TetriNet server, a web cam, and of course AOL Instant Messenger.  Just becuase I think it is si cool to have these kinds of connections in my very dorm room, I keep my computer on 24-7, even though there are long streches of time where I do not use it. (For example: When I am sleeping.)  While I was sitting in class listening to Dr. Wilson talk about the wonders of the Socket class I realized that I could write my own Internet Chat program by connecting two computers via the Socket class and have each prgram sending a string of text from a buffer on their own computers.  It was at this point that I wanted to jump out of my seat and run back to my dorm room....  unfortunatly, I still had an hour left in the class.   So, an hour later, the first version of Spencer was born......
 


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