Will Jini Be the Technology Behind "Smart" Toasters? - Review

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, April 3, 2000

Will Jini radically alter our use of computer networks? Countless developers think so. Jini may turn out to be one of the technologies that allow for truly location-independent computing. Jini may also be the power behind "smart" appliances and gadgets. Sun is betting that when your fridge talks to your dishwasher, Jini will be what makes that conversation happen. Want to dump photos from a friend's digital camera onto your Palmpilot, and from there beam them to a printer? Jini could be the answer.

Jini is a simple set of Java classes and services that allows devices (i.e., printers, storage devices, speakers) and services (i.e., printing) to seamlessly interact with each other without device driver. "Right now, we have lots of text-driven services on a big network -- HTML, XML, whatever -- on the Internet. That's great," says Scott Oakes, co-author of the just-released "Jini in a Nutshell" (O'Reilly, $29.95) "but it's only a first step. In the future, we can have lots of new services targeted towards any device; these services can come and go, as can the clients. Jini is what can make this possible."

"As more and more devices are capable of interacting and being deployed in new, dynamic environments, programmers of the services for those devices need a computing platform that can handle these impromptu communities in a robust manner. And developers need a simple way to write and deploy these services," says Oakes. "Jini is addresses some fundamental needs within distributed computing."

"Jini in a Nutshell" covers everything an experienced Java programmer needs to know about Jini, including tutorial chapters to get you up to speed quickly and reference chapters that analyze and explain every Java package related to Jini.

Chapter 4, Basic Jini Programming, is available online free at: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/jininut/chapter/ch04.html

FMI: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/jininut/noframes.html

The Sun Jini page can be found at: http://www.sun.com/jini/