Sun's Jini competes ( MSFT, IBM, LUCENT )for post-PC paydirt:UPnP,
By Alexander Wolfe
EE Times
(01/26/99, 10:53 a.m. EDT)
SAN FRANCISCO — When Sun Microsystems Inc. publicly rolls out its Jini distributed-computing software Monday (Jan. 25), it will tout the Java-based technology as the cornerstone of a "post-PC" era under which millions of new-age info appliances will communicate across the Internet.
Sun has lined up an impressive array of partners — including Sony, Philips, Quantum, Toshiba and Seagate — in its bid to position Jini as a Net-based service broker. But the Mountain View, Calif., company will face stiff competition as it strives to outflank the Wintel-dominated world.
Three separate forces — Microsoft, IBM and Lucent Technologies — could blunt Sun Microsystems' effort:
In a two-phased approach, Microsoft is banking on its Universal Plug and Play initiative, disclosed at the recent Consumer Electronics show, to support the front end of distributed computing. A second, little-known effort called Millennium, now in the works at its research labs and reportedly a pet project of company technology guru Nathan Myhrvold, will provide the real muscle behind Microsoft's thrust.
Though a Java licensee, IBM is promulgating a different vision of the future under the banner of "pervasive computing." IBM hopes to sell "home servers" into every basement, where they will act as hubs controlling a network of flat-panel displays and information appliances scattered from the kitchen to the living room.
The sleeper in the trio — and the most powerful Jini alternative, according to informed sources — is Lucent's Inferno software technology. Though hampered by lackluster marketing, Inferno is backed by a complete infrastructure that can support highly interactive applications, from e-mail to pay-per-view movies, over any communications network.
Because Jini is venturing into new technical territory, many engineers are confused as to how Sun's marketing jargon will shake out when it comes to building working implementations. Further muddling the picture, some of Sun's competitors are attempting to slap the banner of PC-based home networking alongside Jini's decidedly object-oriented approach to distributed computing.
"We're so far away from the average citizen understanding what this means," said Billy Moon, program director for new concepts at Ericsson Inc. (Research Triangle Park, N.C.). "But the potential of Jini is enormous. You don't need a disk-based operating system, just a broker that can offer services. Everything can be on the network." Indeed, Ericsson envisions numerous potential Jini-based apps driving communications services.
Many vendors have yet to firm up the business model that will bring a payoff from distributed technologies, which are a far more ethereal sell than megabytes-long, shrink-wrapped operating systems. Some see big bucks in supplying the heavy-iron hardware to support the back-end operations of a Jini-enabled world.
Experts give Sun kudos for its work in preparing a complete package of detailed specifications that lay out the terms of network connectivity. Nevertheless, it will take plenty of work before a full range of Jini-based products hits the market. Warned Ericsson's Moon: "It probably will take longer than the people who are working on it want it to. You're looking at an explosion of applications within two or three years."
Jini-enabled storage products may come first. "We are expecting to deliver one or more products that will be Jini-compatible by the end of this year," said Paul Borrill, vice president and chief architect at disk-drive maker Quantum Corp. (Milpitas, Calif.).
Help from Philips, Sony
Sun has laid ample groundwork for its high-visibility public launch. For example, on Monday (Jan. 18) Sun disclosed that it will work with Philips and Sony to create a software bridge linking Jini to the Home Audio-Video interoperability (HAVi) networking scheme developed by eight major consumer-electronics vendors.
Jini's basic technical meat was previewed earlier this month by Ed Zander, Sun's chief operating officer, at a private briefing before a select group of customers at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
That demo, to be repeated at the Jini introduction on Monday, showcased a CCD digital camera made by Axis Inc. Equipped with a Java Virtual Machine and Jini's tightly wound 50 kbytes of basic code, the camera was linked via a 10 Base T Ethernet communications hub to a Quantum hard drive. A Jini lookup server on the network automatically recognized the camera and enabled it to store images on the drive.
Sun's launch event will also show off Jini-equipped products from Epson, Seagate, Toshiba and Matsushita.
"We're going to show you a Jini home and a Jini business and how we're going to enable 'simply connected' computing," Zander said.
On the consumer side, the demo will preview a prototype of the Jini-to-HAVi bridge. A Sony Minidisk audio player on a HAVi in-home network will use Jini to find and download an upgraded software controller. Also on stage will be Philips' D-VHS machine hooked up to a HAVi network. It will locate and download movies from a remote Jini-based video server.
In technical terms, Jini is relatively clean conceptually. It uses a software lookup-and-discovery service to identify devices that attach themselves to the network. (Those devices indicate their initial presence by sending out an electrical arbitration signal to their local communications hub.) Once a device is identified, it is given a location on the net in the form of an Internet Protocol address. The device can subsequently request any software it needs from a server, which is why Sun sees a big selling point in the fact that computer users will not have to install their own drivers on Jini-enabled appliances.
"The key difference between Jini and what Microsoft is doing is that Microsoft is doing their technology as an extension to the Windows platform," said Quantum's Borrill. "The Jini paradigm, however, is totally peer-to-peer. It's designed fundamentally to be a distributed system.
"People have tried doing distributed-computing environments before," Borrill continued. "But there were mistakes made in the early implementations, which we now understand how to get around." Many of the difficulties had to do with the challenge of enabling dissimilar CPU architectures to communicate with one another. That resulted in the need for unwieldy middleware and code bloated by conditional statements.
"Jini masterfully overcomes that problem by making everything homogeneous simply by having a Java Virtual Machine on every platform," Borrill added. The current availability of JVMs for a wide variety of CPU architectures is expected to encourage the development of Jini-based embedded appliances.
According to other advocates, the most significant feature for engineers who will have to make Jini play in the real world is its use of Federations, a term apparently inspired by Star Trek.
"The notion is that you can have a bunch of loosely connected devices which aren't centrally regulated, and it's assumed everyone is friendly," explained Ericsson's Moon. "This concept opens up what you can do. You don't need central management, although you do have to have Jini lookup servers."
From Microsoft's perspective, such notions veer far from today's environments without taking sufficient advantage of current technologies. To counter Jini, Microsoft is pursuing a two-pronged approach based on its recently announced Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) technology and on its Millennium research project.
Conceptually, UPnP performs many of the same functions as Jini. According to Microsoft, intelligent appliances would carry less than 40 kbytes of ROM code to support lookup and discovery on the network by a computer host. Critics point out the UPnP would require all such devices to also be equipped with bulky Windows OS software. Not so, according to Microsoft.
Don't need Windows
"There has been a misconception that somehow UPnP is about PCs," said Alec Saunders, group planning manager of Microsoft's intelligent-appliances division. "It's really independent of any Microsoft operating system. We think you can do this in less than 100,000 gates."
Microsoft is working with industry partners — including Hitachi, Kodak, AMD, Intel and NEC, among others — to develop UPnP as both chips and as software. Microsoft will distribute the initial UPnP developer's kit at its WinHEC conference in April in Los Angeles.
The more ambitious prong of Microsoft's distributed-computing thrust is its closely held Millennium project. In the works in the company's research lab since 1996, the initiative has already built modules of prototype technology, although the complete package is not ready to roll out, according to industry sources.
"Millennium is a research project first and foremost," Saunders said. "It's an ambitious effort to try to transparently distribute an API [application programming interface] across multiple nodes on a network. The idea is you'll have a program and pieces of it will run all over the place. It's trying to solve a very different problem from UPnP: Namely, how do you gain access to computing resources elsewhere on the network transparently to the application?"
Millennium is described by experts familiar with the project as a successor to Microsoft's old-line OLE and DCOM technology. However, it also includes a hefty dose of Java.
Prototype pieces in the works so far are called Borg, Coign and Continuum. Borg is a distributed Java Virtual Machine that makes a cluster of computers appear as a single large computer to any Java application. Coign is a partitioning system that automatically converts local applications into distributed client-server apps. Microsoft sources said that the company has completed its initial implementation of Coign running under Windows NT.
Now, the Millennium group is at work on Continuum. This will "expand upon the best features of Borg and Coign," according to company sources. Continuum's designers have the ambitious goal of distributing the Windows API to create a single computing environment (i.e., one system image) across multiple machines.
According to Saunders, Microsoft does not have any plans to put Millennium out as a product in the near future. Despite Microsoft's denials, industry sources report that the company has talked to at least some developers about Millennium as an alternative to Jini.
In technical terms, some critics see Millennium as being bogged down by its potential size and lack of support for a wide range of CPUs. "It's a homogeneous environment with a central server," said one critic.
On the other hand, other experts in the PC world believe the first leg of Microsoft's plan — namely, UPnP — may turn out to work nicely as a complementary technology to Jini. That's because UPnP could handle much of the grunt work required to secure blocks of IP addresses, while Jini could concentrate on the interaction between the intelligent appliances themselves and the network.
Middle ground
As for IBM, it appears to be pursuing a middle ground between networks that take shape willy-nilly and a more traditional approach to a home network, which relies on a server situated in the basement with the furnace and hot-water heater.
"IBM is looking at a way to provide a virtual terminal and a way to provide a broker between appliances," said one source familiar with the effort.
"I think we'll have distributed displays that won't have PCs attached," said Mary Walker, IBM's director of home networking, speaking at the recent Digital Hollywood conference. "These could be used for the Internet, TV or other functions. We are going to have information appliances distributed throughout the house."
However, Walker added that the ability of the information-appliance market to grow will be hindered without a physical infrastructure — such as dial-up wireless broadband — to deliver ample bandwidth. She believes consumer usage will probably take longer to ramp up than most optimists predict.
In many quarters, Lucent's Inferno is seen as the most credible alternative to Jini. Inferno revolves around the concept of services managed by a file system. It also has a common API and translates Java apps on the fly.
"It's good technology," said one developer familiar with Inferno. However, another developer said that, while Inferno was heavy-duty software, it seemed to be more tuned to the telecom world than to the converging universe of PCs and information appliances.
— Additional reporting by Rick Boyd-Merritt and Junko Yoshida
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