Jini is very XXI Century

Posted: May 14th, 2003 | No Comments »

Jini‘s trendsetters and early adopters are there waiting for the cool followers to show up!

Once every 6 months there seems to be a hype about Jini. Since its release in 1999, Jini must be one of Sun’s worst marketed product, but the marketing people at Menlo Park, Cal do not lose hope to find a niche for this very cool technology. In a few words Jini allows to spread java services over a network (on both software and hardware) and allows Java code to be mobile (since it is based on RMI). My very good friend Pascal Betz and I had a lot of fun using Jini on our Negotiator Project (Negotiating Agent Development Kit) back in the good old days.

The Jini Community approved last week on a first standard, the so-called ServiceUI API, a specification which should provide a standard approach to attach user interfaces to jini services. A stable release of the Jini Starter Kit 2.0 should be available soon to. A few interesting articles poped up after this announcement:

  • Sun tries again with Jini: The trend toward on-demand, or utility computing–where you shift resources from one machine to another–that flexibility is driving an increasing need to manage change, and that’s what’s driving people to use this technology
  • Introducing Jini’s new security features
  • Sun’s Jini May Find Its Niche In On-Demand Computing: Jini’s real strength is to “provide mechanisms to deal with failure and change in a network without an administrator
  • Sun dreams of Jini 2.0: The Jini Starter Kit 2.0 is expected to include a brand-new security model that will allow servers and devices running Jini to decide whether code downloaded from elsewhere in a network is trust-worthy. Also expected is a new implementation of Java RMI (Remote Method Invocation), called Jini Extensible Remote Invocation (JERI), which should help Jini programs to better interoperate with other, non-Jini applications, according to sources familiar with Sun’s plans.