Jini (), also called Apache River, is a
network architecture
Network architecture is the design of a computer network. It is a framework for the specification of a network's physical components and their functional organization and configuration, its operational principles and procedures, as well as commun ...
for the construction of
distributed system
A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...
s in the form of modular co-operating services.
JavaSpaces is a part of the Jini.
Originally developed by
Sun Microsystems, Jini was released under the
Apache License 2.0. Responsibility for Jini has been transferred to
Apache under the project name "River".
History
Sun Microsystems introduced Jini in July 1998.
In November 1998, Sun announced that there were some firms supporting Jini.
The Jini team at Sun has always stated that ''Jini'' is not an acronym.
Ken Arnold
Kenneth Cutts Richard Cabot Arnold (born 1958) is an American computer programmer well known as one of the developers of the 1980s dungeon-crawling video game ''Rogue'', for his contributions to the original Berkeley ( BSD) distribution of Uni ...
has joked that it means "Jini Is Not Initials", making it a
recursive anti-acronym, but it has always been just ''Jini''. The word 'jini' means "the devil" in
Swahili; this is borrowed from the
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
word for a mythological spirit, originated from the Latin ''genius'', which is also the origin of the English word '
genie
Jinn ( ar, , ') – also romanized as djinn or anglicized as genies (with the broader meaning of spirit or demon, depending on sources)
– are invisible creatures in early pre-Islamic Arabian religious systems and later in Islamic myt ...
'.
Jini provides the infrastructure for the Service-object-oriented architecture (SOOA).
Using a service
Locating services is done through a lookup service.
Services try to contact a lookup service (LUS), either by
unicast
Unicast is data transmission from a single sender (red) to a single receiver (green). Other devices on the network (yellow) do not participate in the communication.
In computer networking, unicast is a one-to-one transmission from one point in ...
interaction, when it knows the actual location of the lookup service, or by dynamic
multicast
In computer networking, multicast is group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast should not be confused with ...
discovery. The lookup service returns an object called the service registrar that can be used by services to register themselves so they can be found by clients. Clients can use the lookup service to retrieve a proxy object to the service; calls to the proxy translate the call to a service request, performs this request on the service, and returns the result to the client. This strategy is more convenient than
Java remote method invocation
In computing, the Java Remote Method Invocation (Java RMI) is a Java API that performs remote method invocation, the object-oriented equivalent of remote procedure calls (RPC), with support for direct transfer of serialized Java classes and dis ...
, which requires the client to know the location of the remote service in advance.
Limitations
Jini uses a lookup service to broker communication between the client and service. This appears to be a centralized model (though the communication between client and service can be seen as decentralized) that does not scale well to very large systems. However, the lookup service can be horizontally scaled by running multiple instances that listen to the same multicast group.
See also
*
Jim Waldo, lead architect of Jini
*
Ken Arnold
Kenneth Cutts Richard Cabot Arnold (born 1958) is an American computer programmer well known as one of the developers of the 1980s dungeon-crawling video game ''Rogue'', for his contributions to the original Berkeley ( BSD) distribution of Uni ...
, one of the original Jini architects
* Juxtapose (
JXTA
JXTA (Juxtapose) was an open-source peer-to-peer protocol specification begun by Sun Microsystems in 2001. The JXTA protocols were defined as a set of XML messages which allow any device connected to a network to exchange messages and collabora ...
)
* SORCER (
SORCER
The service-oriented computing environment (SORCER) is a distributed computing platform implemented in Java. It allows writing network-programs (called "''exertions''") that operate on wrapped applications ( services) to spread across the network ...
)
*
Java Management Extensions
Java Management Extensions (JMX) is a Java technology that supplies tools for managing and monitoring applications, system objects, devices (such as printers) and service-oriented networks. Those resources are represented by objects called MBean ...
(JMX)
*
Simple Network Management Protocol
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behaviour. Devices that typically ...
(SNMP)
*
Zero Configuration Networking
*
OSGi
OSGi is an open specification and open source project under the Eclipse Foundation. It is a continuation of the work done by the OSGi Alliance (formerly known as the Open Services Gateway initiative), which was an open standards organization fo ...
Alliance
*
Service Location Protocol
The Service Location Protocol (SLP, srvloc) is a service discovery protocol that allows computers and other devices to find services in a local area network without prior configuration. SLP has been designed to scale from small, unmanaged networks ...
*
Universal Plug and Play
Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a set of networking protocols that permits networked devices, such as personal computers, printers, Internet gateways, Wi-Fi access points and mobile devices to seamlessly discover each other's presence on the n ...
(UPnP)
*
Devices Profile for Web Services
The Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) defines a minimal set of implementation constraints to enable secure web service messaging, discovery, description, and eventing on resource-constrained devices.
Its objectives are similar to those of ...
(DPWS)
*
Tuple space
A tuple space is an implementation of the associative memory paradigm for parallel/distributed computing. It provides a repository of tuples that can be accessed concurrently. As an illustrative example, consider that there are a group of process ...
*
CORBA
The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) designed to facilitate the communication of systems that are deployed on diverse platforms. CORBA enables collaboration between s ...
References
External links
*
{{Authority control
Jini
Jini (), also called Apache River, is a network architecture for the construction of distributed systems in the form of modular co-operating services. JavaSpaces is a part of the Jini.
Originally developed by Sun Microsystems, Jini was released ...
Java platform
Beta software
Software using the Apache license