Ken Arnold's Blog

June 2004 Archives

Knowing What's Where

So far today the most interesting talk I've been to is the one on RFID techonology by Sun. They've built it on Jini and Rio, which itself is built on Jini, and they have an impresive platform for dong stuff with RFID applications. The match is good because these systems require customization and smarts at the edge of the network, where the data is gathered, because otherwise too much data would be sent back to the central processing systems. Jini is built on the idea of moving behavior to where it's needed. They also have to deal with failures all the time, so having something that is low maintenance to install and heal is critical.

What's going on with RFID itself is also interesting. We're getting to the point where tracking objects -- real objects -- will be a major focus of computing. When you can know where every piece of paper is in your files we will have a new scale of relationship modeling. (Well, new to most -- in the past anyone dealing with this much specific information was using large-scale systems that were very hard to build.) I think there will be a lot of interesting work in figuring out how to correlate all the information in a timely fashion.

Tomorrow's candidate for "Most Likely to be Wow" is the Orbitz talk. Ever thing you book on Orbitz runs on a Jini backplane.

Community Session Tonight

Tonight we'll get a look at several of the communities. Don't miss it. Jini, JXTA, Java Community Process, and java.net will all have a chance to give a whirlwind presentation (and prizes), and then you'll get a chance to corral folks about any one you're interested in. Question about JIni? Ideas about JXTA? Complaints about the Java Community Process Just come in, see what's up, get some food and drink, maybe win a prize, but most certainly find some real stuff out from the folks who are doing it.

The Unexpected Newborn Adult

JavaOne is next week. Of course you know that.

The folks who do Java stuff out in the world have ranged from intrigued to fanatic about Jini and JavaSpaces, but those who set the schedule always seem to have something else to talk about. Somehow the Jini/JavaSpaces stuff is always "new". It's been "new" for over six years now. Last year it was part of the emerging technology track over five years after it emerged. This year it's apparently "unexpected". I kid you not: The track it's in is "Intruiging and Unexpected: New and Cool".

Let's get real. Jini is in mission critical web sites (this year's talk by Orbitz might get your attention, for example). Companies have been run for years on its software. Sun itself is betting its RFID strategy on Jini. Large scale systems use JavaSpaces, starting with its introduction six years ago as a show-wide demo, and including (this year) a a large grid-computing system by a major investment company to follow on from last year's talk by Freddie Mac, among others.

The one talk you must go to if you have any doubts is the overview of where the whole technology stands. Your head will spin as you are whirlwinded through a survey of what's actually happening in the marketplace, both in industry leaders and startups. Then make up your own mind.

But to Sun this stuff seems to be perpetually arriving. New. Every year it's new. Which is unexpected. You'd think Sun would have noticed by now that it isn't new, that Jini and JavaSpaces are being used in ways where, if they didn't do the job, they would be chucked out before the company failed. Intruiging, isn't it?

For many folks at Sun there are two kinds of Java: J2EE and J2ME. Everything else is just baggage. And these folks seem to control the agenda for JavaOne. The number of rejected talks by big projects using Jini, JavaSpaces, and other Java technologies is pretty amazing.

The Jini community -- inside Sun and out -- keeps sticking to it, thank goodness. This year, as in the past, we'll just make our own conference-within-a-conference. Your primary resource for this is probably Frank Sommer's summary of what's shaking with Jini and JavaSpaces at JavaOne this year. There are a lot of things going on, and more things happening informally. Keep your eye out for the Jini folks, both from Sun and otherwise. There will be many around.

Maybe it's time we started passing out "Ask Me About Jini" buttons. Start our own pyramid scheme. If Sun won't bother to make Jini and JavaSpaces visible -- even squelch them in this most public Java forum -- we'll just have to make it happen ourselves. Join in, or at least give the overview talk a listen to see whether you ought to care. I think you'll be surprised how this perpetual newborn is already a responsible (if cool) adult.

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