This is the Boulder IO package.

Boulder provides a simple stream-oriented format for transmitting data
objects between one or more processes.  It does not provide for the
serialization of Perl objects the way FreezeThaw or Data::Dumper do,
but it does provide the advantage of being language independent.

In addition to a stream-oriented interface, Boulder comes with a
simple record-oriented database-oriented interface, Boulder::Store,
which provides query and search capabilities comparable to many flat
file DBMS systems.

At the MIT Genome Center, Boulder is used for many interprocess
communication tasks, as well as an abstract database interface for
several large databases, including GenBank.

To install, run the following commands:

	% perl Makefile.PL
	% make
	% make test (optional)
	% make install

If any of the tests fail, run "make test TEST_VERBOSE=1" and note
which subtests fail.  Note that you will need the DB_File module
installed in order to take advantage of the Boulder::Store database
functions.

Please see the documentation, Boulder.pod, and the various .pm files
for more information.  See the eg/ directory for some practical
examples.

Lincoln Stein
lstein@cshl.org
