Sun Microsystems set to unveil software magician
Easy-to-use system will obviate need for device drivers
By DAVID AKIN
The Financial Post
Sun Microsystems Inc. will unveil a new piece of software this fall that may one day
put network administrators out of a job.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Sun is set to release Jini 1.0, a piece of software best
described as meta-software; software that binds other software together; that contains
a kind of uberprotocol that guides the interaction of software, data, and network
services. One report described it as a constitution; the unifier for the disparate
software states of the world.
If it does what its promoters promise, Jini could be a self-healing, self-directed
network architecture, forever changing the role of computer system support staff.
The goal of Jini's developers is to allow any service or device to be plugged into a
network and be immediately available for use on that network. No more device
drivers. No more issues about compatibility. No more operating system wars. Just
plug-and-play or, as Sun's Jini evangelists like to say, plug-and-work.
Your video camera, for instance, could tell your printer to print or tell a smart card to
download information to a hard disk -- all without the hassle of installing and learning
to use new software.
With Jini, if you can plug it in, you can make it work.
"The phrase we use is spontaneous networking," said Ken Arnold, a senior staff
engineer with Sun and one of four lead architects of Jini. Mr. Arnold, 40, who is based
in Sun's labs outside of Boston, was in Toronto yesterday to demonstrate his creation.
When a new printer comes into the office today, a system administrator needs to
install a small piece of software called a device driver on every computer that plans to
use that printer. Device drivers, like any software, are frequently updated requiring
another trip around the office by a network administrator.
With a Jini-enabled network, the printer is plugged into the network and promptly
sends a message to every other device or client it is connected to identifying itself as a
printer and letting the rest of the network know what it can do. Armed with that
information, each computer or other device on the network can interact with it
accordingly.
The benefits for large corporations is reduced system administration costs. For users,
the benefits will be measured in increased productivity and fewer frustrations if only
because Jini was designed on the assumption that parts of the network will, in fact,
inevitably fail from time to time. In that way, Jini is more fault-tolerant, an engineer's
way of saying something has been built for real-world conditions. By contrast, other
network protocols assume that the network and the devices connected to it are always
working properly. When parts don't work, other parts slow down or don't work
properly, as well.
"We are trying to make it so it's easy for people who actually write programs and
who write services and who actually get something done, to grab and go,"said Arnold.
Jini, which rhymes with beanie and is derived from an Arabic word which means
magician, is written in Java, the programming language developed by Sun which,
ostensibly, runs on any machine or platform, be it a server running Unix, an iMac
running MacOS 8.5, or a digital PCS phone with its own proprietary operating
system.
Those who get a copy of Jini -- which will be available free via the Web -- will not
only get a working compiled copy but will also get uncompiled source code. Mr.
Arnold said Sun is hoping corporate administrators, researchers, and hackers will
fiddle with Jini and adapt it. If, after assessing Jini's effectiveness and adaptability, it
gets deployed in a commercial environment, Sun expects to receive a licensing fee.
For Jini to become as popular as Java, users will have to find it sleek, easy to use,
and easy to customize. Its small size, too, in an age of applications that take up millions
of lines of code will also be attractive.
"One of the things we've done with Jini is be aggressively simple," said Mr. Arnold.
"Most of our design sections have been sitting around with the specs and saying, 'Why
do you need to do that?' Our architects spend most of our time throwing stuff out. If in
doubt, throw it out. The value of simplicity is really high. The value of not having a lot
of stuff is really high.
"This is basically an enabling technology for deployment and use of support services
in a network," said Mr. Arnold. "What you're doing is making it easy for people to
make services available on a network and easy for people to use those services. What
you need to think about it as, is as a way of making the network as open to you as
your disk is. If it's out there, you can find it."
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