Jini Technology

 

Jini Technology

The Jini networking technology developed by Sun Microsystems, is an innovative technology for building reliable, fault-tolerant distributed applications. It allows to easily form networks to share services without previous planning, installation or administration effort.

Jini is a service-oriented architecture that defines a programming model that both exploits and extends Java technology. This programming model enables the construction of secure, distributed systems consisting of federations of well-behaved network services. Jini helps to build networks that are scalable and flexible, which are required attributes in distributed computing scenarios.

Jini's main objective is to shift the focus of distributed computing from a disk-drive-oriented approach to a network-adaptive approach by developing scalable, evolvable and flexible dynamic computing environments. Jini makes resources over a network look like local resources.

Jini has the following key advantages:

• Provides stable networking solutions

• Helps in upgrading systems

• Helps to keep old clients running while adding new ones

• Helps build scalable, dynamic and flexible networks.

Jini system consists of the following parts:

•  A set of components that provides an infrastructure for federating services in a distributed system

•  A programming model that supports and encourages the production of reliable distributed services

•  Services that can be made part of a federated Jini system and that offer functionality to any other member of the federation.

Jini Technology is a simple, lightweight protocol for automatic maintenance and advertisement of intranet services. It defines entities known as User , Service Provider, and Lookup Service, and defines the protocol operations between them. JINI offers an easily understood model of service operations, and relieves system administrators of the need to configure service information in most new user installations.

 Taking services offline for routine maintenance, or bringing them back online, can occur with no reconfiguration needed on user machines. Installing new services is as easy as filling out a form. Services may also be enhanced to allow them to automatically register with JINI, so that no administrative intervention is reauired at all, beyond activating the Service Agent. Designing and debugging new services is also supported inherently by the design of the service namespace.

It is our belief that JINI is the best choice for future management of networked services, and that this superiority will continue to widen as the world of computing increasingly becomes the world of access to network services and resources.