A definition of Jini

"With Jini, network configuration and maintenance is very easy," says Scott Oaks, a Java technologist with Sun and the author of O'Reilly's newly released Jini in a Nutshell. "In fact, it's so easy that Jini allows impromptu network communities to exist. Services and consumers of services can come and go, and the Jini infrastructure can deal with those changes without other network activities being interrupted or affected. This is especially important in places where there is no such thing as a system administrator: like a public conference room, your home, or an airplane."

The Jini vision most commonly bandied about for the sake of end-user or consumer understanding is the intelligent home network with interacting devices and systems such as appliances, alarms, and lighting. Within the enterprise, it's the idea of a laptop and a printer finding each other on a network on their own and negotiating the appropriate print driver.

"Device interoperability is a cool, useful piece, and everyone talks about it because it's easily understood," Oaks says. If you talk about being able to print automatically to a Jini-enabled printer without installing drivers, then everyone has a conceptual understanding of Jini's benefits because everyone's struggled with errant printers before."

A new way of thinking

The fact that Jini treats everything as a service has implications for all programs and applications in distributed environments. "This means that any and all services a developer has already written can be wrapped inside of Jini services, and can access the benefits of Jini--even something like a spell checker service that doesn't have anything to do with a piece of hardware," explains Henry Wong, Oak's co-author and colleague at Sun.

Jini's greater significance is that is represents an utterly new way of thinking. "From a developer's perspective, Jini requires them to think about dynamic and potentially unreliable environments," Wong says. "The simple fact is that networks and services will fail. Jini makes developers account for these possibilities in their code, so they end up writing better programs."

The concept of services also opens the door to building intelligence into networks using Jini. Current technology hasn't progressed quite to that point yet, however. Although the core ideas behind Jini have been around for a long time, the technology itself is still in the toddler stage (to borrow an analogy from the Perl programming language's creator Larry Wall).

"In some ways, Jini is very advanced, and in some ways, it's very rudimentary," Oaks acknowledges. A lot of work has gone into basic Jini APIs (application program interfaces) and infrastructure, building on longstanding research. A very large and active Jini user community is emerging, but because Jini is less than a year old, no one has finished even a basic printer API yet. There's much more work to be done.

The Jini developer community

Jini's framework is subject to the standard community process within Sun. The larger Jini development community is responsible for defining the common service definition APIs. "This means that changes to the framework are developed in conjunction with input from experts in the field," Oaks explains. "The changes are then published in draft form, which goes out for public review. After the review period, changes are made and the new specification is published."

The upcoming summit, offers interested developers a chance to learn exactly what's happening with Jini development. In addition, the Jini community will form a marketing council to help promote Jini and the community's efforts. Scott Oaks will present a session on "Jini in the Enterprise."

What Jini in a Nutshell covers

"We cover it all!" Oaks declares. "We took an iterative approach in the book: we start with a very simple service and client, and start building Jini features into it. By the end of the book, the reader can write a service that can be fully activated, that is persistent, and that leases its resources to a client that is only periodically on the network," Oaks says. "And in the mode of Java in a Nutshell, there's an extensive API quick-reference section for the Jini APIs. We even cover Jini 1.1, based on its current alpha draft."

Barriers to wider deployment

The issue of approaching development differently is one of the barriers to Jini's wider deployment in the IT industry. Underlying assumptions in coding for distributed computing tend toward continuously functioning networks and constantly available external administration. "It takes a certain amount of discipline to think the opposite way: to program for dynamic environments without system administration," Oaks says.

Other barriers keeping Jini from hitting the mainstream have to do with lagging infrastructure to support the Jini vision. Device manufacturers will need to incorporate special Java microchips to accommodate Jini, and there is some delay in Java development necessary to successfully produce those chips.

Competing technologies

Another technology of H-P's, e-speak, may be more conceptually comparable to the Jini vision. The architects of e-speak describe it as a programming interface for service providers and service users to assemble themselves into dynamic federations where service policies can be expressed and uniformly enforced.

"At a fundamental level, e-speak, UPnP, and Jini look like they're doing the same thing (or at least are capable of doing the same thing)," Oaks continues. "But they all do it differently, and that's going to impact what they're really able to do."

Different implementations will also affect whether these technologies assume complementary or competitive roles. Oaks and Wong believe market forces will determine much of the outcome as these technologies become more widely available. "It may be that Jini ends up being the service application layer on top of UPnP for devices, and that e-speak is used to make Internet e-commerce applications talk to each other, and everyone will be happy."

Jini's future: "Innovation will happen"

Oaks draws a comparison to a prevailing belief during the early Java market in 1995 that Java applets would have a major impact. However, Java has ended up more predominantly used on servers. While the current buzz around Jini centers on devices and device connectivity, what people are actually doing with it is writing software-based services in their enterprise, according to Oaks. "And just as Java applets are just now beginning a resurgence, so too the case may be with Jini on devices in a few years."

"The truth is, we probably don't know the answer to the question of how Jini will ultimately be used," Wong adds. "In many ways it's like the Web: when the Web started, it was to share documents. Now it's for e-commerce, and video-on-demand, and a host of other things. There's a lot of talk about how Jini will make your refrigerator talk to your toaster, but is that really the way things will happen? Probably not." More likely, Jini will lead to completely new ways of thinking about device interaction, and on into uncharted territory in applications development.

"Someone out there will develop killer apps in Jini that we haven't even thought about," Oaks concludes. "Bill Joy always says, 'Innovation will happen, and it will happen elsewhere.' "