First wishes made of Jini

Now that Jini 1.0 has been loosened upon the world, it's time to see what wishes people are asking it to perform.

In part one of this article, Sun Chief Scientist Bill Joy told us that the company is "working on building a 'Jini community' of companies and organizations who are defining Jini devices and services using the Java language and Jini distributed computing concepts." He said he's seen "an enormous amount of interest" already in the new technology but that much work remained for Sun and its partners to define these new devices and services. "Getting all this done as quickly as people want will be a challenge," noted Joy.

Make that a serious challenge, judging by the reaction from those who have been first to seek practical results from Jini. Though the developers and executives we spoke with recently understand that fulfilling Jini's promise will take time, they nonetheless clamored for immediate support for Jini in enterprise software solutions, as opposed to the much-touted dream of Jini in every type of networked device -- a scenario that is looking as far-off as it is far-out.

As one expert said in last week's installment: "Jini is usable now for serious applications, but the realization of the complete vision will take a while. ... software services will be deployed first, devices will be slower to show up, but it is inevitable that they will."

So let's take a look at the infrastructure Sun has set up to work with Jini technology vendors and developers, then we'll hear from those who have been putting it through its early paces. Increasingly, their wishes, not Sun's, seem to be getting the attention of the magic lamp.

"Community" outreach

To accomplish this laudable goal, the company has set up a number of initiatives [see links in resources section].

Community resources include Jini code download, demos, specifications, a listserv, usage guidelines, white papers and documentation, and a community program offering developer assistance, co-marketing, and technical support.

Support is divided into three levels of service:

• Level A: No commercial license required. Offers an "arsenal" of technical and advisory support programs and participation in the Jini Community Council.
• Level B: Available as needed to commercial developers. Features a technical support hotline, onsite support, a "wide array" of education and training services, and conformance testing.
• Level C: Available to professional groups "who want the maximum level of support available" for a fixed fee. Assistance with trade-show participation, co-op advertising, public-relations support, and participation in the Jini marketing advisory program.

According to Sun: "The Jini Technology Community is comprised of any development organization or individual interested in creating applications or services based on Jini technology. Members must execute the basic Sun Community Source License (SCSL) agreement to obtain access to Jini technology source code."

Early Jini Technology Community Members include such heavyweights as 3COM, AOL, Cisco, Kodak, Ericsson, Hewlett Packard, Motorola, Novell, Philips, Sony, and Xerox. But there are many other relatives of the Jini family whose names are not household words -- the BizTones and ObjectSpaces of the software world.

These smaller firms are not to be taken lightly. For they have the adaptability to make things happen very quickly. And time is of the essence with Jini.

Said Anne Thomas, an analyst at The Patricia Seybold Group: "How long will it take before I can get a Jini-enabled alarm clock and coffee maker? Minimum: 18 months before the market can really get started. ... I think Jini will probably take off sooner in the office arena than in the appliance arena."

First to market

Miko Matsumura, who recently joined start-up BizTone.Com as its chief strategist after serving as Sun's chief Java evangelist for three years, told us, "Our flagship product deploys Jini, and we will be the first company to ship Jini products."

Matsumura's new company is working on a Jini-enabled product called BizTone Financials, part of an enterprise-resource management suite due to ship this month. BizTone Financials uses JavaSpaces, a key service in the Jini architecture, which offers a means to scale enterprise-resource financial data to very large numbers of users by distributing the task of handling transactions to multiple machines.

"We are currently using JavaSpaces for database queries," he said. "We are adding the discovery protocols to our next revision of the product. We use Jini for scalability and avoiding a single point of failure in our enterprise application."

Asked about his company's relationship with Jini's creators, Matsumura answered: "We have been working closely with Sun. Our feedback has been very positive, and Sun is very excited about out products. Members of the Jini team have said that our product demo was 'awesome'."

Another pioneer agreed that Jini's first fruits will appear in the enterprise market.

David Norris, CEO of ObjectSpace, maker of a standards-neutral development platform, said: "Our proposal is to bring Jini to the enterprise to provide interoperability between different services at that level. That does not mean you can not do devices also -- because we do plan to offer support for devices. But at the enterprise level, services need to be able to find each other, and we plan to provide the interoperability to allow that to occur." He said there's no reason why a C++ component, for example, in a Microsoft platform should not be able to use a Java/Jini service.

"We are out there in the real world building real solutions with real clients, and they have every kind of system in the world and every kind of legacy language you can imagine," Norris commented. "So we have to provide solutions for them that are not '100% pure Java', although we all wish they would be. But it's impractical to think that way. At the device level, Sun can definitely wish that, and they can try to make that happen; but at the enterprise level, it's just not feasible... At the enterprise level, clients do not generally receive Jini very well, because it doesn't seem to be addressing their needs -- the perception is that Jini is for devices. We're trying to solve that problem."

He said that ObjectSpace will feature Jini capabilities in its Voyager product line, a set of distributed-computing infrastructure products that aim to help simplify distributed computing, beginning in the second quarter of the year. "Our support will have interesting differences as compared to some of the things that Sun is doing."

Though Voyager will compete with products Sun itself has in the works, Norris said ObjectSpace is a true believer in Jini technology. "Jini support can be part of a backbone of infrastructure necessary for corporations to have very highly used components that are distributed throughout the enterprise. I believe it will be an infrastructural piece that is very important, especially to corporations that have large numbers of applications and components, an example would be a trading house on Wall Street."

How did he view the experience of working with Sun to produce a Jini-enabled product? Due to the nature of the complicated relationship, he was understandably less enthusiastic than Matsumura but still positive.

"Our feedback from the Jini group has had more to do with the specifications," said Norris. "Our only issues have been with accessibility to the code and to support, and that has been reasonable. We haven't given them much feedback, but they haven't set up a very good mechanism to supply feedback."