Linda primer?

[Brian Candler]

I've been trying to find out some info on Ruby's "Rinda". I'm familar with
DRb, but not Rinda/Linda.

All the materials I can find on the web seem to say something along the
lines of: "Rinda is just like Java's Linda, but for Ruby". But not being a
Java-head, I don't know anything about Linda. Or they say: "it's a
blackboard where you store and retrieve tuples", without any details about
the semantics of these store and retrieve operations.

What I'm looking for is an overview including:
- what the data model looks like
- what basic operations the client can request
- what the semantics are of these operations

Does anyone know of any documentation at this level?

The rdoc at http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/rinda/rdoc/index.html
doesn't really help me. To take one example, Rinda::TupleSpace#move says:

"move(port, tuple, sec=nil) {|template| ...}

Moves tuple to port"

I have a vague inkling of what a "tuple" is, but I certainly don't know what
a "port" is in this context.

As a secondary question: does anyone know of any cross-platform tuplespace
systems which could be shared between, say, Ruby and Perl? (I realise I
could stick a SOAP facade onto a Rinda TupleSpace, but perhaps there's a
better way)

Many thanks,

Brian.

 

[Olivier Renaud]

Le mercredi 21 f=E9vrier 2007 22:19, Brian Candler a =E9crit=A0:

I've been trying to find out some info on Ruby's "Rinda". I'm familar with
DRb, but not Rinda/Linda.

There are some simple examples in the great book "Ruby Cookbook", by Lucas=
=20
Carlson and Leonard Richardson (the part about drb and rinda is actually=20
written by James Edward Gray II).
At the end of the articles, there are pointers to online documentation that=
=20
may interest you :

http://rubyforge.org/docman/view.php/251/216/DistributedRuby.pdf
http://segment7.net/projects/ruby/drb/rinda/ringserver.html

regards

=2D-=20
Olivier Renaud

 

[Ryan Davis]

I've been trying to find out some info on Ruby's "Rinda". I'm
familar with
DRb, but not Rinda/Linda.

All the materials I can find on the web seem to say something along
the
lines of: "Rinda is just like Java's Linda, but for Ruby". But not
being a
Java-head, I don't know anything about Linda. Or they say: "it's a
blackboard where you store and retrieve tuples", without any
details about
the semantics of these store and retrieve operations.

Linda has been around far longer than Java. I suggest going to the
source:

How to Write Parallel Programs: A First Course by Nicholas Carriero
and David Gelernter.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/026203171X

 

[Brian Candler]

...
http://rubyforge.org/docman/view.php/251/216/DistributedRuby.pdf

That's very good, thank you!

 

[Pierre-Charles David]

Linda has been around far longer than Java. I suggest going to the
source:

How to Write Parallel Programs: A First Course by Nicholas Carriero
and David Gelernter.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/026203171X

A PDF version is available at http://www.lindaspaces.com/book/index.html

The Java version of Linda is actually called JavaSpaces. Other
implementations exist for various languages, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_(coordination_language)