DRuby and Rinda: implementation and application of distributed Ruby and its parallel coordination mechanism

Abstract

The object-oriented scripting language Ruby is admired by many programmers for being easy to write in, and for its flexible, dynamic nature. In the last few years, the Ruby on Rails web application framework, popular for its productivity benefits, has brought about a renewed attention to Ruby for enterprise use. As the focus of Ruby has broadened from small tools and scripts, to large applications, the demands on Ruby's distributed object environment have also increased, as has the need for information about its usage, performance and examples of common practices. dRuby and Rinda were developed by the author as the distributed object environment and shared tuplespace implementation for the Ruby language, and are included as part of Ruby's standard library, dRuby extends method calls across the network while retaining the benefits of Ruby. Rinda builds on dRuby to bring the functionality of Linda, the glue language for distributed co-ordination systems, to Ruby. This article discusses the design policy and implementation points of these two systems, and demonstrates their simplicity with sample code and examples of their usage in actual applications. In addition to dRuby and Rinda's appropriateness for prototyping distributed systems, this article will also demonstrate that dRuby and Rinda are building a reputation for being suitable infrastructure components for real-world applications.