Jini article... does not look like a threat to ALYA anytime soon if ever.
Jini may be out of the bottle, but winning
market acceptance could be the real trick.
For starters, it is the first Sun Microsystems
Inc. technology that IBM is not fully backing.
And while developers say Jini is as
revolutionary as Java itself, IBM's lack of
support is a big departure from the previous
everyone-but-Microsoft alliance.
So far, that hasn't daunted Sun. The
company has positioned Jini, released last
month, as a software layer that permits
devices to recognize each other and share
services on a network. But Sun already is
laying the groundwork for broader uses.
Strategic Technology Resources, a
Chicago-based integrator and Sun
Authorized Java Center, just completed a
project with Alcatel USA using JavaSpaces,
Sun's first service on top of Jini. Sun released
JavaSpaces at its JavaOne developer
conference last March and plans to offer it
under a separate license from Jini.
STR and Alcatel built a three-tier
architecture that hooks into the telco's
intelligent network and allows it to very
quickly deploy new services -- such as
Web-800 -- in Java. In the future, Alcatel
servers will be directly available to cell
phones, PDAs, set-top boxes and other
devices.
"We began the project before we knew what
Jini was, and when we saw the underlying
code the entire picture made sense," said
Larry Podmolik, STR's chief technology
officer. "I would love to get involved with
embedded systems using Jini. That has not
historically been a market for us, but I think
over time the current sharp line between embedded systems and
PC/workstation/server computing will start to blur."
Jini: A massive departure
However, Sun's partners say Jini is such a departure that for the moment
it creates two different ways of using Java -- via the enterprise
Java/CORBA world that IBM pushed Sun to create, and via Jini, which
relies on a federation of Java Virtual Machines to define the behavior of
a network and the devices on it.
ObjectSpace Inc., which like IBM has a competitor to Sun's
JavaSpaces, declined to attend the Jini launch because of the lack of
focus on the enterprise.
"We're in a better position now than ever," said cofounder David Norris.
ObjectSpace has an investment from Novell Inc. and plans to integrate
Jini and Java with CORBA, the Object Management Group's Common
Object Request Broker Architecture.
Podmolik says he also thinks Sun may be taking a risk by focusing Jini
so heavily on devices, although he calls Jini "a brilliant piece of
engineering."
"Jini is so different from what we've got now that it leaves a lot of stuff
behind," Podmolik acknowledges. "It's absolutely the right thing
technically, but it's a much harder sell because it implies a fundamentally
new computing infrastructure."
Sun itself is not saying exactly how it will adopt Jini. Dan Berg, the chief
technology officer for Sun's U.S. reseller area, said Sun chose the
device metaphor to represent Jini because it's easy to understand.
"Jini is a way for computer chips and systems to quickly form an
impromptu system with other systems, but these could just as well be
other software systems," Berg said. "You could offer an ERP service
through Jini where ERP could advertise that it provides certain services
and others could register for them."
But IBM, meanwhile, has still not licensed Jini and will not support Jini in
its VisualAge Java tools, a company spokeswom |
