Hitting the distributed computing sweet spot with TSpaces

Abstract

Our world is becoming increasingly heterogeneous, decentralized and distributed, but the software that is supposed to work in this world, usually, is not. TSpaces is a communication package whose purpose is to alleviate the problems of hooking together disparate distributed systems. TSpaces is a global communication middleware component that incorporates database features, such as transactions, persistent data, flexible queries and XML support. TSpaces is an excellent tool for building distributed applications, since it provides an asynchronous and anonymous link between multiple clients or services. The communication link provided by TSpaces gives application builders the advantage of ignoring some of the harder aspects of multi-client synchronization, such as tracking names (and addresses) of all active clients, communication line status, and conversation status. For many different types of applications, the loose synchronization provided by TSpaces works extremely well. This paper relates our experiences in building distributed systems with TSpaces as the central communication component.