Distributed Programming with Ruby

Book excerpt: Complete, Hands-On Guide to Building Advanced Distributed Applications with Ruby Distributed programming techniques make applications easier to scale, develop, and deploy—especially in emerging cloud computing environments. Now, one of the Ruby community’s leading experts has written the first definitive guide to distributed programming with Ruby. Mark Bates begins with a simple distributed application, and then walks through an increasingly complex series of examples, demonstrating solutions to the most common distributed programming problems. Bates presents the industry’s most useful coverage of Ruby’s standard distributed programming libraries, DRb and Rinda. Next, he introduces powerful third-party tools, frameworks, and libraries designed to simplify Ruby distributed programming, including his own Distribunaut. If you’re an experienced Ruby programmer or architect, this hands-on tutorial and practical reference will help you meet any distributed programming challenge, no matter how complex. Coverage includes Writing robust, secure, and interactive applications using DRb—and managing its drawbacks Using Rinda to build applications with improved flexibility, fault tolerance, and service discovery Simplifying DRb service management with RingyDingy Utilizing Starfish to facilitate communication between distributed programs and to write MapReduce functions for processin large data sets Using Politics to customize the processes running on individual server instances in a cloud computing environment Providing reliable distributed queuing with the low-overhead Starling messaging server Implementing comprehensive enterprise messaging with RabbitMQ and Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Offloading heavyweight tasks with BackgrounDRb and DelayedJob