Towards Linda-Based Decentralized Collaborative Applications by an Architecture Approach

Linda is an effective paradigm in developing decentralized collaborative applications since its nature of global share repository and decoupling both in time and space, which contribute to flexibility, mobility and availability. But very few projects adopt Linda because of its high abstraction: a tuple space compositing of a collection of flat tuples and several primitives, which cannot be easily used as the constructive entities in application design. An architecture approach, however, can fill this gap by identifying the common elements of collaborative applications. In this paper, we propose an architecture approach to construct Linda-based decentralized collaboration applications. We consider the design of that kind of systems as mapping application-specific entities to a collection of agents, tuple types, tuple spaces and replication policies, which is inspired by common features of collaboration. Furthermore, we implement components and tools providing concrete support to our approach.