Dan Creswell
Posts: 49
Nickname: dancres
Registered: Apr, 2003
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Re: Whither Jini?
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Posted: Aug 5, 2006 1:56 AM
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Hi Bruce,
I have a couple of questions and some thoughts:
"Jini also needs a better out-of-the-box experience. You should be able to install it and throw together a Jini server and client with only a few simple lines of code and very little research."
What sort of thing were you thinking you would throw together in a few lines - hello world or something else? Perhaps you could enumerate the sort of thing you get with a typical J2EE app server? Incidentally, Jini has an installer these days and even makes great efforts to ensure you have a valid network configuration.
"Here's an example: I've recently been working on a distributed programming problem, and the possibility of using Jini came up. It quickly became obvious that the overhead of implementing the dynamic lookup mechanism -- which is, indeed, a clever and thorough solution to that problem -- was something that we had no idea how long it would take to implement."
Who did you discuss this with? Maybe Bill Venners but I certainly didn't notice a posting to the JINI-USERS list for example where you could've engaged with a bunch of us "Jini zealots".
"Jini, too, has been around for quite awhile and I haven't personally seen or used any Jini-enabled applications (that I know of) and I haven't encountered any problems that have motivated me to go up the Jini learning curve myself."
I have to say, I think that's faulty logic - why do people run up the J2EE learning curve which has got to be at least as tough as learning Jini? Is J2EE really the only way to build an enterprise system? J2EE will have started out small just as Jini has - I'd contend it got mass adoption because it's very much like everything that went before. And that's progress?
Second of all, if you don't take the time to talk to the likes of myself, Mark Brouwer, Gregg Wonderly, Jim Waldo, Brian Murphy, Bob Scheifler etc (all of whom frequent the Jini lists) when trying to get your head around Jini and what you might use it for I can't see how you're doing a fair or valid evaluation.
Thirdly, I've consulted to a number of firms using Jini in finance, pharmaceutical, broadcasting and EAI so it is out there and it is successful.
Finally, as an aside, you'll see lots of elements from Jini appearing in the designs of the likes of Google's systems. That's not to say that Google are doing "a better version of Jini". Rather that some of the design patterns embodied in Jini are proving useful to them. And that is the real essence of Jini, best practice distributed computing patterns distilled into specs, code and frameworks which you can pick and mix as you require.
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