Added a README.

[sockstream.git] / README

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+Introduction.
+
+The sockstream library provides a collection of C++ classes for socket communication.
+Support is provided for UNIX domain sockets, IPv4 and IPv6 sockets, with either stream
+or datagram communication. Stream sockets can be used with STL iostream classes thus
+providing I/O over the internet in a manner similar to fstream and stringstream.
+
+Installing.
+
+Provided you downloaded the libsockstream package as a tarball, the usual
+'./configure; make install' should be sufficient to install the library and header
+files needed for your application program. If you downloaded the latest sources
+from the git repository, you need to create the configure script and other
+autotools files first by issueing 'autoreconf -i'.
+
+Prerequisites.
+
+The sockstream library uses the String class from the AXE library.
+In order to build the library, you need to install the AXE library first.
+You may download AXE from http://www.andromeda.nl/projects/AXE/AXE.html.
+
+The documentation is written with XMLdoc (http://www.andromeda.nl/projects/xmldoc/xmldoc.html)
+and drawings are created with tgif (http://bourbon.usc.edu:8001/tgif/).
+You will need to install both these packages to transform the documentation
+into other formats such as HTML or PostScript.
+