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 Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commun ...

s in the form of modular co-operating services. JavaSpaces is a part of the Jini. Originally developed by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

, Jini was released under the Apache License 2.0. Responsibility for Jini was transferred to

Apache The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...

in 2007 under the project name "River", but the project was retired in early 2022 due to lack of activity.

History

introduced Jini in July 1998. In November 1998, Sun announced that there were some firms supporting Jini. The Jini team at Sun 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 Software Distribution (BS ...

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 Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

word for a mythological spirit, originated from the Latin ''genius'', which is also the origin of the English word '

genie GEnie (General Electric Network for Information Exchange) was an online service provider, online service created by a General Electric business, GEIS (now GXS Inc., GXS), that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around ...

'. 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 a type of 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 differs from ph ...

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 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 distributed garb ...

, 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.

References

External links

* {{Authority control Jini Java platform Beta software Software using the Apache license

History

Using a service

Limitations

See also

References

External links