From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2007-02-22T06:19:02+09:00
Subject: 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.