Programming Tutorials

Using remote objects under dRuby

By: Jeya in Ruby Tutorials on 2009-03-03  

This example illustrates returning a reference to an object from a dRuby call. The Logger instances live in the server process. References to them are returned to the client process, where methods can be invoked upon them. These methods are executed in the server process.

Server code

  require 'drb/drb'

  URI="druby://localhost:8787"

  class Logger

      # Make dRuby send Logger instances as dRuby references,
      # not copies.
      include DRb::DRbUndumped

      def initialize(n, fname)
          @name = n
          @filename = fname
      end

      def log(message)
          File.open(@filename, "a") do |f|
              f.puts("#{Time.now}: #{@name}: #{message}")
          end
      end

  end

  # We have a central object for creating and retrieving loggers.
  # This retains a local reference to all loggers created.  This
  # is so an existing logger can be looked up by name, but also
  # to prevent loggers from being garbage collected.  A dRuby
  # reference to an object is not sufficient to prevent it being
  # garbage collected!
  class LoggerFactory

      def initialize(bdir)
          @basedir = bdir
          @loggers = {}
      end

      def get_logger(name)
          if [email protected]_key? name
              # make the filename safe, then declare it to be so
              fname = name.gsub(/[.\/]/, "_").untaint
              @loggers[name] = Logger.new(name, @basedir + "/" + fname)
          end
          return @loggers[name]
      end

  end

  FRONT_OBJECT=LoggerFactory.new("/tmp/dlog")

  $SAFE = 1   # disable eval() and friends

  DRb.start_service(URI, FRONT_OBJECT)
  DRb.thread.join

Client code

  require 'drb/drb'

  SERVER_URI="druby://localhost:8787"

  DRb.start_service

  log_service=DRbObject.new_with_uri(SERVER_URI)

  ["loga", "logb", "logc"].each do |logname|

      logger=log_service.get_logger(logname)

      logger.log("Hello, world!")
      logger.log("Goodbye, world!")
      logger.log("=== EOT ===")

  end