Distributed Ruby (DRb)

dRuby is a distributed object environment for Ruby. dRuby and Rinda are part of Ruby stdlib.

• RMI (remote method invocation) library
• extends Ruby method calls across the network
• allows calling object methods from other processes or machines
• written completely in Ruby

Rinda:

• shared tuplespace implementation.
• co-ordination mechanism running on dRuby.
• implementation of linda co-ordination language in Ruby

Rules for passing objects between client and server:

• serializable objects are passed by value
• non-serializable - by reference

Example code

# server.rb
require 'drb/drb'

queue = SizedQueue.new(100)
DRb.start_service('druby://localhost:9999', queue)
DRb.thread.join

# publisher.rb
require 'drb/drb'

DRb.start_service
q = DRbObject.new_with_uri('druby://localhost:9999')

100.times do |n|
  sleep(rand)
  q.push(n)
end

# consumer.rb
require 'drb/drb'

DRb.start_service
q = DRbObject.new_with_uri('druby://localhost:9999')

100.times do |n|
  sleep(rand)
  puts q.pop
end

Articles

• dRuby and Rinda: Implementation and application of distributed Ruby and its parallel coordination mechanism
• dRuby documentation
• Reflection, Object Space and Distributed Ruby
• dRb on Wikibooks
• Rinda 101
• Exploring Tuple Spaces Persistence In Ruby With Blackboard
• dRuby for penetration testers
• An Introduction to Distributed Ruby