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MAC5759 - Three years ago, Jini was touted as the sure path to ubiquitouscomputing. What happened to it?
- Subject: MAC5759 - Three years ago, Jini was touted as the sure path to ubiquitouscomputing. What happened to it?
- From: PROTECTED
- Date: Fri, 3 May 2002 00:17:32 -0300
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Marcos Couto
Where's Jini?
By Kieron Murphy
Three years ago, Jini was touted as the sure path to ubiquitous
computing. What happened to it?
It's been a while since Sun Microsystems launched its technology for
creating software to make devices work together as a "community". The
kick-off for Jini was sufficient to put it at the heart of any
discussion of the future of network software. It had its share of
questionable concerns, but these were met with the assurance that time
would provide solutions. Three years and counting, though, the
question in the mind of developers today is: "Whatever happened to
Jini?"
Rolled out by no less a figure than Sun co-founder (and famous
futurist) Bill Joy, Jini was described in 1999 as follows: "Built on
top of a Java software infrastructure, Jini technology enables all
types of digital devices to work together in a community put together
without extensive planning, installation, or human intervention. Each
device provides services that other devices in the community may use.
These devices provide their own user or programmatic interfaces, which
ensures reliability and compatibility."
It was quite a vision of things to come. So with the benefit of
hindsight, it seems fair to ask how it's panned out so far.
I spoke first with Sun's spokesperson for the technology, who
acknowledged that Jini has not lived up to the early hype that
surrounded it but urged patience and perseverance on the part of
developers.
"When Jini first came out, it was positioned as device-centric," said
Franc Romano, Jini group marketing manager for Sun. "Now, we're trying
for a more-balanced approach toward software services. This is the
major change in positioning since Jini was launched."
Today, Sun uses slightly different language in its official
description: "Jini technology is an open architecture that enables
developers to create network-centric services, in hardware or
software, that are highly adaptive to change. It can be used to build
adaptive networks that are scalable, evolvable, and flexible as
typically required in dynamic computing environments."
Romano told me his company sees the software world as being in a
protocol-intensive period now, citing XML, SOAP, and UDDI as examples;
but they see the next cycle as being "protocol-agnostic," offering an
opportunity for Jini to move into session and directory spaces now
held by the XML-related protocols.
"UDDI gives way to Jini to create a network of 'embedded things',
allowing expansion into automobiles and the home," said Romano.
Right now, though, his group sees themselves as still in an "early
adopter phase" in which they get Jini "into the hands" of developers.
He estimated that as many as 80,000 developers currently work with
Jini, building infrastructure, components, and services for networks,
primarily in the telecom, financial, and health-care fields.
"We still have a long way to go before Jini is mainstream, however,"
Romano admitted.
To combat the pitfalls of over-anticipation -- hype -- the Jini group
has adopted a market-driven approach, he said. "We're being very
careful not to get out in front of our developers... to support
whatever direction they're going."
"Jini's model of computing actually resembles the highly spontaneous
and unpredictable world most of us live in and conduct business
within. ...Bottom line: Jini is good enough to create real software
with it now. And it's getting better."
With a pending upgrade to Jini 2 planned for next year, Sun may be
able to buy some breathing room for the technology's eventual success.
But will developers, notorious for their fierce pragmatism, exercise
the patience and perseverance to wait for it to finally gain momentum?
Word on the Street
To gain some balanced perspective on where Jini is now and could be in
the future, I asked around to see what insiders had to say about its
status in the industry.
For starters, I spoke with a pair of developers coming at Jini from
different angles. One using it for hardware, one for software.
Danh Le Ngoc is the co-founder of aJile Systems, maker of a
direct-execution processor for embedded Java applications on devices.
They recently partnered with PsiNaptic to bring Jini functionality to
their aJ-100 offering.
He said his firm has received "strong interest from existing customers
as well as new ones, who have waited for a Jini solution for
Java-based mobile devices and Internet-based industrial gateways and
sensors." But he identified a key impediment currently hindering Sun's
aproach for small-footprint products -- its reliance on Remote Method
Invocation.
"RMI-based Jini is too big for small, deeply embedded devices," said
Ngoc. "Fortunately, [PsiNaptic's] JMatos on aJile processors has
resolved this technical issue."
Asked where he saw Jini going in the future, he was nevertheless very
upbeat. "Jini-enabled devices powered by direct-execution processors
will be pervasive in the next two years. They will be deployed broadly
at home, factory, and enterprise."
Aidan Mark Humphreys is the system architect for Procoma GmbH, which
markets a new Jini-based XML document-presentation tool called
Chameleon, recently adopted by Germany's Commerzbank AG.
His take on Jini today? "It allows the programmer to think about
developing systems that expect and deal with outage, mobility, the
addition and removal of services -- in short, Jini's model of
computing actually resembles the highly spontaneous and unpredictable
world most of us live in and conduct business within. ...Bottom line:
Jini is good enough to create real software with it now. And it's
getting better."
Humphreys said he thought Sun had, indeed, made a mistake in taking so
long to pitch Jini to application developers, as opposed to the device
community.
"Jini actually represents a conflict for Sun, it doesn't yet help
their hardware sales, but it could if marketed as a software services
technology impact their market leading J2EE initiative and the Web
services area they are penetrating. I suspect Sun are looking coldly
at Jini and wondering where it fits into the picture."
"Jini has not become one of the significant technologies in the Java
family."
His outlook for Jini's future is that it will gain wider acceptance
but only if managed aggressively. He pointed to Jini's underlying
JavaSpaces framework, modeled after David Galernter's famous
tuple-spaces architecture, as promising.
"There is already growing interest in tuple-spaces from non-Sun
sources. The Python and Ruby communities, for example, have their own
tuple-space implementation that could be made interoperable."
Beyond that Humphreys was cautious. "Unless Sun really get behind Jini
to the extent that they did for J2EE and drum up support both amongst
device manufacturers and software developers, there is a real risk
Jini, as a pure Java technology could fade away."
Analyze This
A pair of analysts were even more concerned about Jini's drift. One
was hesitant, the other downright pessimistic.
Forrester Research infrastructure analyst Laura Koetzle said: "Sun
initially pitched Jini as an ideal P2P framework for small, mobile
devices, but Jini requires every peer to run a Java Virtual Machine.
Small, mobile devices are often resource-poor, which makes running a
full JVM difficult and creates substantial opportunity cost."
She sees Sun's own Jxta (invented later by Bill Joy and Crew,
ironically) as Jini's main competitor. "By dropping Jini's VM
requirements, Jxta... lowers the barrier to P2P networking entry. By
remaining OS- and VM-independent, Jxta stays flexible enough to
provide infrastructure for the P2P apps of the future," she noted.
Distributed computing guru JP Morgenthal, author of Enterprise
Applications Integration with XML and Java, gives Sun a thumb's down
for what it has accomplished with Jini. He states flatly, "Jini has
not become one of the significant technologies in the Java family."
Morgenthal sees Jini as competing with many open standards movements
at the same time, such as Jxta and Web Services. "They pushed Jini
hard at hardware manufacturers to include as embedded components," he
said. "This requirement results in additional expensive hardware and a
reliance upon a technology that has not been broadly adopted by a
large user base."
Jini in a Bottle
The testimony puts Jini in a precarious position these days. It could
recover from its stumble out of the blocks or end up pulling out of
the marathon, well out of the race. A harsh economic environment can
mean gloom for technologies that do not quickly fend for themselves,
but it can also strengthen the halest. We still don't know how Sun
will manage Jini to maturity, but it clearly has a lot of parenting to
do.
In the meanwhile, Procoma's Humphreys should get the last word:
"Jini's approach will live on, because it's a paradigm that matches
the pattern of future computing much better than today's big-selling
enterprise approaches. So even if Jini fades, I have little doubt that
in five years something similar will have taken its place and entered
the mainstream -- but maybe based on .NET. That is the danger Sun are
running if they walk away from Jini now."
Resources
Jini Network Technology
The Community Resource for Jini Technology
A first look at Jini lookup and discovery protocols
Jini in reality
JavaOne 4.2: Mr. Joy's wired on the future
A Jini voyager: an interview with David Norris of ObjectSpace
A Jini pioneer: an interview with Freeman Jackson
First wishes made of Jini
Jini released from its magic lamp
<li><a href="http://www.sun.com/jini/">Jini Network
Technology</a>
<li><a href="http://www.jini.org/">The Community Resource for
Jini Technology</a>
<li><a href
="http://softwaredev.earthweb.com/java/sdjojta/article/0,,12401_
617291,00.html">A first look at Jini lookup and discovery
protocols</a>
<li><a href
="http://softwaredev.earthweb.com/java/sdjojta/article/0,,12401_
603671,00.html">Jini in reality</a>
<li><a href
="http://softwaredev.earthweb.com/java/sdjjavaee/article/0,,1239
6_611801,00.html">JavaOne 4.2: Mr. Joy's wired on the future</a>
<li><a href
="http://softwaredev.earthweb.com/java/sdjojta/article/0,,12401_
609491,00.html">A Jini voyager: an interview with David Norris
of ObjectSpace</a>
<li><a href
="http://softwaredev.earthweb.com/java/sdjojta/article/0,,12401_
609401,00.html">A Jini pioneer: an interview with Freeman
Jackson</a>
<li><a href
="http://softwaredev.earthweb.com/java/sdjojta/article/0,,12401_
608931,00.html">First wishes made of Jini</a>
<li><a href
="http://softwaredev.earthweb.com/java/sdjojta/article/0,,12401_
608851,00.html">Jini released from its magic lamp</a>
About the Author
Kieron Murphy is the editorial manager of EarthWeb.