The Ruby Way: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming, Second Edition

20.3. Rinda: A Ruby Tuplespace

The term tuplespace dates back as far as 1985, and the concept itself is even older than that. A tuple, of course, is simply an array or vector of data items (much like a database row); tuplespace is a large object space full of tuples, like a kind of “data soup.”

So far, a tuplespace implementation sounds boring. It becomes more interesting when you realize that it is accessible in a synchronized way by multiple clients. In short, it is inherently a distributed entity; any client can read or write the tuplespace, so they can all use it as a large shared storage or even as a way to communicate.

The original tuplespace implementation was the Linda project, an experiment in parallel programming at Yale University ...