T Spaces: The Next Wave

Millions of small heterogeneous computers are poised to spread into the infrastructure of our society. Though mostly inconspicuous today, disguised as nothing more than PIM (personal information management) computers, these tiny processors will eventually pervade most aspects of civilized life. The one thing holding them back from being everyone's portal to the new electronic society and the access point to an in nite store of information is the lack of a high-quality logical link to the world's network backbone. Enter T Spaces, a network middleware package for the new age of ubiquitous computing. T Spaces is a tuplespace-based network communication bu er with database capabilities that enables communication between applications and devices in a network of heterogeneous computers and operating systems. With T Spaces, it is possible to connect all computers together, which leads the way towards an in nitely large cluster of cooperating machines. In this paper we describe the T Spaces package and explore some distributed applications