IBM's TSpaces could be going places

Java-based middleware to link all sorts of computing devices to each other.

By Marc Songini
Network World Fusion, 3/17/98

San Jose, Calif. - Have you ever wished your electric toothbrush could talk to your mainframe?

While that may be pushing it, IBM has a slightly less ambitious project - a Java technology called TSpaces that will allow small computing devices to talk to each other or access corporate backbone resources with relative ease.

A test version of TSpaces was posted on IBM's alphaWorks Web site for developers to play with, and the product will be publicly demonstrated at the Java One conference later this month.

There are many small devices currently in use, such as Palm Pilots and personal digital assistants that are begging to be linked to the network, according to IBM. And new devices are on the way, including smart phones and more advanced pagers.

IBM is fond of calling these small products "Tier-0" devices. T-Spaces is the middleware that IBM hopes will let them talk over an IP network.

For example, think of your car as a LAN. According to Tobin Lehman, the IBM Almaden Research Lab staffer heading the TSpaces project, the automobile has 20 embedded computers in it. TSpaces conceivably could set up a link to allow these to communicate, share a database and even have varying degrees of security privileges for what they access.

While aimed at small devices, TSpaces also can link PCs, Unix workstations and various host computers as clients.

How it works

TSpaces has both client and server pieces; a bit of code resides on the client, leaving a small footprint, while the server component sits on a Web server. The TSpaces software running on the Web server works as "a virtual connecting layer that connects all machines and creates a common, consistent platform," Lehman said.

The middleware provides a common data format, database and messaging system that knows how to send the right data to the right source. Select clients that are tuned to receive certain types of messages can pick them up in a TSpaces environment, making TSpaces resemble IP multicasting.

While the first iteration of TSpaces will work with only text-based files, the technology will eventually handle voice, video and other rich types of data.

TSpaces sounds like a good idea to Bill Cason, chief technology officer at PSW Technologies, an Austin, Tex.-based software developer and systems integration company. "That would be very powerful," he said. An application that would get these devices communicating with corporate backbones would catch on like Lotus Notes, he added.

IBM declined to divulge pricing or commercial product availability.