Jini A Reality: Plug And Play Far Behind

Computergram International, Jan 20, 1999

By Rachel Chalmers On Monday January 25, Sun Microsystems Inc will launch Jini, its Java-based network dial-tone technology. Jini demos have peppered internet events for the last few months, gradually becoming more and more elaborate and culminating in Sun chief science officer John Gage's keynote at the RSA Data Security conference on Tuesday.

Gage plugged a camera, disk and printer into a box running Jini, took photos of the stage, saved them to disk and printed them out. Jini lets the devices recognize each other and exchange information about their resources without the need for drivers. If the demos are anything to go by, it seems to work reasonably well. It is written that wherever Sun is, there Microsoft shall be also. At the Consumer Electronics Show, the Redmond software giant announced a new way of getting devices to talk to each other over a network, to be called Universal Plug and Play. Microsoft has not yet returned ComputerWire's calls, but Jim Waldo, chief Jini architect for Sun, offered this comparison: "Universal Plug and Play is an initiative," he said, "Jini is a demo-ing piece of technology." Sun is giving away the source code to Jini, he pointed out. Microsoft's proposal doesn't even have any source code yet. The most telling difference between the two is, h owever, the architecture. "Universal Plug and Play is, I think, an attempt by Microsoft to use their model of centralized control inside the operating system to get the same functionality we get in Jini from the federation model," he said. Jini devices share information by moving code around the network. Universal Plug and Play looks likely to happen at the desktop OS level. That difference matters because of what happens as you add more and more devices. "The federation model scales extremely well," said Waldo, "centralization doesn't." The hard thing about writing Jini, Waldo reveals, was making it simple. It is much harder to design simple systems than complex ones. Making Jini as simple as it is took: "the best part of the last six years of my life," he says. That's good news for Microsoft, in a way. "They'll have our experience to build on," says Waldo, "the real question is whether they want to recreate a system that scales through federation, or whether they want to reimplement it with centralized control." While the latter will bring more power to the operating system, Microsoft's typical modus operandi, Waldo doubts whether it will work, "These days that single point of failure is not acceptable," he says. The news is not all bad. Waldo is encouraged by the fact that Microsoft is talking about defining interfaces for devices. "Whatever interfaces are defined will work just as well for Jini," he said. "Done right, Universal Plug and Play could be a way of speeding Jini. I'm still enough of an idealist to think that it will be done right." Intel, HP, Compaq, Dell, Cisco, Kodak, Samsung, Lucent, National Semiconductor, 3Com, Diamond Multimedia, TI, AMD, Lexmark, NEC, Honeywell, Fujitsu, Sharp, Hitachi and AT&T are just some of the companies in the Universal Plug and Play camp. Canon, CA, Epson, Ericsson, FedEx, Mitsubishi, Novell, Salomon Brothers and Seagate have thrown in their lot with Jini. Axis Communications and Toshiba are promiscuous supporters of both Sun and Microsoft. As ever, the winner will be the last technology standing.