Hi all, In light of some of the recent discussion about sockets (e.g. the "behond IOStreams" thread), I'd like to take this opportunity to announce "asio". asio will be going live in a commercial system in a little over a month, and I think it's now at a point where it is suitable for use by a wider audience. I would like to think that asio has potential as the basis of a boostified networking library, or that at least it can inject some ideas into the discussion. asio is a cross-platform library for doing network programming, using a "modern" c++ style. It is designed to use an asynchronous I/O model for virtually all operations, even when the OS lacks native asynchronous I/O. The library is intended to ease the development of scalable network applications through the use of a proactive event-driven architecture. You can download asio from: http://tenermerx.com/programming/cpp/asio/asio-0.1.12.tar.gz I have also put the generated documentation online at: http://tenermerx.com/programming/cpp/asio/asio-0.1.12/doc/html/ asio supports Win32 and Linux, and has been infrequently tested on Solaris. It is free for any use. Here is a sample usage of asio showing how to receive data on a socket: char buf[BUFSIZ]; void handle_receive(asio::error& e, size_t bytes_recvd) { if (!e) { /*...*/ } } int start_receiving(asio::socket& s) { s.async_recv(buf, BUFSIZ, boost::bind( handle_receive, asio::arg::error, asio::arg::bytes_recvd)); } I have been working on asio for well over a year and, as I said, it will be going into production in a commercial system in a little over a month. For commercial reasons I can't give too much detail, but I can say that asio has been used to develop a custom HTTP proxy that supports hundreds of concurrent connections. The inspiration for asio was the work of Alex Libman in developing a "portable Proactor framework" for ACE (see http://www.terabit.com.au). This is a Proactor that can use select or a similar synchronous event demultiplexer if no more appropriate OS mechanism is available. Regards, Chris