(2004-05-19) Iroom Tspaces

Clay Shirky on a tech document on the Stanford University IWork/I Room/Event Heap. The paper is about solving social coordination problems among software by giving every piece of software access to a shared "space" where all the software can see the messages being passed around and acted on by the other software. (Uses IBM's TSpaces TupleSpace implementation.) Paper notes extensions they found necessary to the TupleSpace model: self-describing tuples, flexible typing, typed tuples, tuple sequencing, expiration of tuples. Paper also notes latencies of up to 1sec in TSpaces!