I'll try to give an overview of the available resources for networking with Ecere.
First, Ecere has built-in networking functionality that might be interesting:
- A Socket class, that works with both TCP/IP and UDP sockets. The Service class is used when writing a TCP/IP service. Useful for implementing a particular or custom network protocol. There is a quick overview on the wiki . That thread is similar to this one, with a list of all the resources available for networking. Of particular interest to you might be the threads/threadsAndListBoxes sample, which teaches threading and networking together. UDPSample is a very nice short and sweet sample for UDP, or just getting started with the Ecere sockets. games/Othello is a nice and simple sample of how to use the Ecere Socket classes. Ecere Chess uses them as well, but is a bit more complex game (though the networking code is similar).
- The Ecere Distributed Component Object Model, or Ecere DCOM: This lets you invoke methods of objects living on a server, remotely. With EcereDCOM you can write network applications without writing a single line of networking code. This is done by declaring your class with 'remote class', and importing the module that declares it from the Client side with 'import remote'. The best sample to start on this would be net/DCOMSample: it implements a very simple chat client. There are some outstanding ASCII values/case sensitive issues regarding the project file name and ordering of the files in the project that have yet to be resolved with EcereDCOM: beware. games/ruff and games/scrabble are fully networked using EcereDCOM.
- Built in HTTP as file objects: anywhere an Ecere API takes in a file name, a URL starting with "http://" can be passed in. This applies e.g. to the FileOpen function, which will return a File object. Thus any HTTP URL can be opened as a File. HTTPFile and HTTPFile::OpenURL can be used directly as well for more options.
- Ecere includes 'NetworkClientFile' as well, a class meant to be used to access a file on a server, with seeking support. It was originally developed for buffered video playback. We should probably move this class outside of the runtime library into extras. samples\net\networkFile contains the Server code as well as the Client sample on how to use this functionality.
I hope this paves the way for you to learn Ecere networking easily

All the best,
Jerome