Distributed Programming with Ruby

Chapter 4 Starfish

Starfish1 bills itself as “a utility to make distributed programming ridiculously easy.” I think that is a bit of an overstatement, but Starfish certainly can make distributed programming easier. The library was built by Lucas Carlson of the website http://mog.com, who also co-wrote Ruby Cookbook (O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2006).2

Starfish sets out to fulfill two different, but useful, roles in the distributed programming world. In its first role Starfish sets out to play the part of a facilitator, setting up quick servers and clients that can be used to call and execute distributed code. In its second role Starfish implements a Ruby version of the popular MapReduce3 distributed computing paradigm.

This chapter first looks at ...