Linda primer?

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.

Le mercredi 21 février 2007 22:19, Brian C. a écrit :

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
Carlson and Leonard Richardson (the part about drb and rinda is actually
written by James Edward G. II).
At the end of the articles, there are pointers to online documentation
that
may interest you :

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

regards

On Feb 21, 2007, at 4:19 PM, Brian C. wrote:

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

On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 07:32:57AM +0900, Olivier R. wrote:

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

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

That’s very good, thank you!

2007/2/22, Ryan D. [email protected]:

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 How to Write Parallel Programs

The Java version of Linda is actually called JavaSpaces. Other
implementations exist for various languages, see