Toby Lehman
Toby Lehman
I'm currently the leader of the TSpaces project.
TSpaces began as a communication component of GCS (Grand Central Station), a web crawling and information gathering project. It was used to link the crawlers together, to be a simple search engine and to hold the user data (from accounts and profiles to the answers returned by the engine). After a while, the TSpaces component took on a life of its own as it became clear that this serendipitous blend of tuplespace, database and Java was an extremely powerful network middleware service.
So, what is TSpaces? TSpaces is a network communication buffer with database capabilities. It enables communication between applications and devices in a network of heterogeneous computers and operating systems. TSpaces provides group communication services, database services, URL-based file transfer services, and event notification services. Compared to the systems whose function it emulates, TSpaces is tiny. With its small footprint, it is ideal for bringing network services to small and embedded systems; for example, it brings the power of the network to palm devices, making them fully-fledged network computers.
For the client, being connected to TSpaces is like having the perfect assistant: TSpaces will remember things for you, it will carry out any tasks that you assign it, it will report incoming messages and deliver outgoing messages, and it will notify you of any events in which you're interested. By adding additional client applications, TSpaces can be used as a universal print service, email service, pager service, remote control service, and so on. Since it is written in Java, TSpace client applications can be loaded dynamically into any network-attached computer. The TSpaces package comes with several useful applications that show how to build TSpace clients. The TSpace server, also written in Java, can be upgraded while it is running, thus avoiding costly downtime.
Even though I'm now in the Web and Cyberspace Technologies department, I'll probably be known as a database guy for a while longer. I've worked on Cyber-Soda project (putting our soda machine on the web and making it directly controlled by the web and TSpaces), the Object-Relational Strike Force, the DB2 Relational Database product, the Starburst research project (doing both memory-resident work and large object work), the Shared Memory-Resident Cache research project, the ADSM backup product (back when it was a research project), a space-age computing environment and the R* distributed database research project.
No, I didn't have the energy to type in all of my relatively short list of publications, but, if you can believe it, Michael Ley, a person that I don't even know, maintains a bibliography service for the entire database community. Along with many other pages, he has created my bibliography page. Sure, some things are missing that don't appear on his radar screen -- some position papers here and there, the IBM System Journal papers, the book chapter and some other lessor articles. But, for the most part, it's an excellent resource!
Over time, I'll put copies of various papers in this directory for folks to grab: My papers directory. However, I guess I have to figure out how to make that directory publically accessible.
For now, I'm going to make accessible some specific papers:
Toby Lehman, K57/D3
IBM Almaden Research Center
650 Harry Rd.
San Jose, Calif. 95120-6099
USA
| External Phone | (408) 927-1781 | |
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| Building Fax | (408) 927-2100 | (this is the only thing that works anymore) |
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