Java Distributed Computing

Appendix C. JavaSpaces

JavaSpaces is a new distributed object system being proposed by Sun as a package at a higher level than the existing RMI and object serialization facilities built into Java. JavaSpaces provides a distributed, persistent object system that is roughly modeled after earlier shared memory systems, such as LINDA. While it has some analogies with parallel shared memory systems such as the Posix shm_xxx library and shared memory facilities in parallel languages like Python, it also has some important differences.

This appendix provides an overview of the general JavaSpace architecture as currently described in the draft JavaSpace specification. It doesn’t go into detail about how to use the JavaSpace API, since the API isn’t fully available yet. This appendix only includes the core elements of the specification, without discussing any proposed features that may or may not be in the final API.