Chapter 20. Distributed Ruby

Less is more.

—Robert Browning, “Andrea del Sarto”

In the last 25 years, many technologies enabling distributed computing have been devised. These technologies include various flavors of RPC as well as such things as COM, CORBA, DCE, and Java’s RMI.

These all vary in complexity, but they do essentially the same thing. They provide relatively transparent communication between objects in a networking context so that remote objects can be used as though they were local.

Why would we want to do something like this in the first place? There might be many reasons. One excellent reason is to share the burden of a computing problem between many processors at once. An example would be the SETI@home program, which uses your ...

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