Sean Rhody, a senior consultant with Computer Sciences Corporation and editor-in-chief of Java Developer’s Journal [http://www.javadevelopersjournal.com], says Jini, Sun’s latest Java product, is designed to allow any device to participate and share in a network. The idea, he says, “is that your home electronics or your office electronics can interact with each other and discover services that are available.”
Sun [http://www.sun.com] titles their Jini section “Say Hello to Instant Networking.” In their words, “[Jini provides] simple mechanisms that enable computers and devices to plug together to quickly form impromptu, networked communities assembled without any planning, installation or human intervention.” In other words, it lets you network anything, anytime, anywhere into what Sun calls “impromptu community.”
“Impromptu community,” according to Sun’s Jini FAQ, is “another way to describe what happens when two or more devices using Jini technology come together to share their services. It is impromptu, since the devices do not need any prior knowledge of each other in order to participate.” In other words, it eliminates the need for configuring devices or installing drivers. If a camera is plugged into the network it instantly joins the network without drivers to install, floppies or a CD-ROM to insert, or keyboard commands to type. It can identify itself and offer services, much like saying “Hi everyone, I’m a camera, anyone need pictures? ” If you had a laptop that used Jini, you could access the camera, snap a photo, route it to your own disk drive or send it to another device for printing.
As an example, Rhody says, “your desktop printer in your home office could announce that it provides a printing service. Your CD player might announce an HTML-based lookup service to tell you what CDs are loaded in your 100-CD changer. With the latest WebTV software you could look up your CD collection from your changer and print it to your printer.” But such integration is, Rhody says, “years away.”
The first approach for Jini is a software-only layer, he explains, that will sit on top of NT and Solaris. “Adding the Jinilayer should not be particularly painful,” Rhody says, since “the core of Jini is tiny, about 48K. So, with a minimum of intrusion and development, the basics of Jini can be implemented anywhere.
But “even this will have some immediate benefits,” Rhody maintains, since “one of the key concepts of Jini is the elimination of drivers. Imagine how much easier it would be if you could just discover the printers available to you and print to any of them without ever having to install a printer driver for the particular printer you wanted to use. Or being able to install a network card without bothering to install drivers.
Yet if all this sounds too good to be true, Rhody cautions, it probably is. “One of the biggest impediments to new technology and innovation is the chicken-and-egg approach of vendors to technological advances,” he explains. “Until there is a sufficient installed base of Jini products and services, it will be difficult to require products to support this technology.”
