Purpose
To provide, through a standard web-service interface, a tuple-space-like capability which can be used by other services and by applications running in the ELF container.
We have chosen to implement this service instead of using JavaSpaces, the tuple-space which has long been part of the Jini Technology package (see http://java.sun.com/developer/products/jini and also http://javaspaces.org), for two reasons:
- The API is more limited; we do not require the full generality of JavaSpaces with respect to serializable classes; our service accepts an open-ended (i.e., basically untyped) wrapper object containing a serialized xml blob as payload, corresponding to the
ncsa.tools.common.types.Configurationobject. - There are serious problems in using multicast technologies on NCSA's production resource subnets.