Has anyone used rinda, pylinda, or the like?

Question

Does anyone have any experience with rinda, the ruby library for the linda blackboard system? Most specifically, I'm curious about the possibility of using it to provide a ruby interface (with some sort of shim) to some extant erlang code via the tuplespace. So any knowledge about the protocol it uses would be great.

But more generally I'm interested in hearing any experiences with it--how robust/stable/efficient it is (or isn't) and any tips or gotchas that may benefit the unwary.

Since I'm not getting any takers, I'll broaden the question: I'd also be interested in any experiences with pyLinda or any other dynamic/scripting language implementations of the blackboard/tuple space paradigm.

Two hours in and not even a comment. Hmmm. What about JavaSpaces? Anyone?

Answer 1

For Python I've used Pyro to implement a shared memory system modeled after tuplespace. Pyro uses its own protocols for nameservers, server discovery, subscribing / sending data, etc. so it would probably be quite hard to re-use the protocols. It's also pretty Python specific (native python data types only).

If your goal is to "provide a ruby interface to some extant erlang code via the tuplespace" it sounds like you'll have to write some kind of IPC from scratch. If that's the case why not write something that exposes that code/data over HTTP (or maybe XMPP since Erlang has a good XMPP app) and get lots of support 'for free' from all kinds of languages and tools?

I guess it depends on what you already have set up and what exactly you're trying to share between Ruby and Erlang.