Tuplespace-based Coordination Infrastructures for Interactive Workspaces
Brad Johanson and Armando Fox
Submitted to the Journal of Systems and Software Special
Issue on Application Models and Programming Tools for Ubiquitous Computing
Abstract
The current interest in programming models and software infrastructures to
support ubiquitous and environmental computing is heightened by
the falling cost of hardware and the ubiquity of local-area
wireless networking technologies. Interactive workspaces are
technologically augmented team-project rooms that represent a
specific sub-domain of ubiquitous computing. We argue both from
related work and from our own experience with a prototype that the
tuplespace model of communication forms a good basis for a
coordination infrastructure for such workspaces. This paper
presents the usage and characteristics expected of interactive
workspaces, from which we derive a set of key system properties
for any coordination infrastructure in an interactive workspace.
We show that the design aspects of tuplespaces, augmented with
some new extensions, yield a system model, which we call the Event
Heap, that satisfies all of the desired properties. We also
briefly discuss why other coordination models fall short of the
desired properties, and describe our experience using our
implementation of the Event Heap model. The paper focuses on a
justification of the use of tuplespaces in interactive workspaces,
and does not provide a detailed discussion of the Event Heap
implementation or our more general experience with interactive
workspaces, each of which is treated in detail elsewhere.
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