A Programmers Guide to Jini Technology

TUE BUSINESS AND ACADEMIC WORLDS HAVE WNG ACCEPTED the use of networking technologies, allowing users to share files and applications and to exchange infor- mation using network services such as email. The explosive growth ofthe Internet has made everyone conscious of the importance of networked applications, and this importance is set to growat an enormous rate with the emergence ofhome and mobile networks. For the programmer, building distributed applications can be a complex business. There are issues related to network stability and accessibility in addition to partitioning applications into portions that can run separately but still be linked into larger functional units. A large variety of frameworks-experimental and commercial-have been devised to make it easier to build and deploy distributed applications. Jini is one of the latest frameworks for building distributed applications. Created by Sun Microsystems, it builds upon previous experiences but also intro- duces new concepts that fit into the modern object-oriented world. Jini is written in Java and distributes and organizes applications based on the distributed object- oriented principles supported by Java. It allows the programmer to build type-safe applications with distributed garbage collection, which results in applications that are resilient to network failures and can that discover and use distributed services atneed.