Linda and the Web

On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 10:30:19AM -0700, Champion, Mike wrote:
> Once again, I relied on my fading memories rather than Google. Bad idea!
> Sorry for the confusion.  (In my own defense, I was mainly interested in
> getting discussion started, not in pontificating!)

No apologies required!

> Yes, I find Gelertner more intriguing than illuminating ... and AFAIK the
> Linda papers are not on the Web anywhere, so what I know of it is mostly
> secondhand. Still, I'm not clear on why GET / PUT / POST / DELETE of 
> resource representations on the Web is RESTful but (using Javaspaces
> terminology) read / write / take of Entries in a Space is not.

Mostly because there's a dichotomy in Linda between tuples and tuple
spaces; tuples are not representations of tuple spaces like they are
on the Web (which is why Linda doesn't have the equivalent of PUT).
Another manifestation of this is that in the Linda protocol, only
tuple spaces are identifiable, not tuples.  The Web, through the
composite relationship between a resource/representation (tuple) and a
container resource (space), defines a more general model.

There were a lot more design flaws with Linda that explained why it
didn't become the Web, though.  But since this has little to do with
reliability, perhaps we should take it offline?

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis