Ken Arnold's Blog

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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.

JiniFest

Last night was JiniFest, which was a blast. JiniFest is what the Jini community does at JavaOne to have folks show what they're doing with Jini. Some are community projects led by interested geeks and others are commercial products. So while the Java community folks are doing boring (if important) process stuff, the Jini folks are having a party.

Jini is generally the best kept secret of Java, and in that vein, The Powers That Be™ put JiniFest in the farthest possible room from the main area of the community event. You had to walk past empty rooms to find it. Not that this implies that some folks in Sun are putting Jini down, of course.

The room, though, was crowded with folks doing fun stuff with Jini. If nothing else, we had the largest percentage of Brazilian of any event on the floor. There were around 30 community projects and companies with tables showing what they've been doing. Some have been with us since Jini was released, and others just went public. At least one company went from no Jini code to full product release in less than nine months, so it all happened since the last JiniFest.

I can't possibly remember it all, and I don't want to play favorites. Some companies had Jini development and deployment tools, including some interesting hardware demos with stuff that looks like props from an Austin Powers film (that is, it looks like a spoof on 007 technology). Several companies had products using Jini to build systems, including financial and taxes to security. Some were so new they hadn't even started last year, and others are ongoing for some time. The projects were led by some folks who just had something they wanted to do.

The first annual award for service to the community went to Bill Venners, who (among other things) runs artima.com. Bill has been doing the monthly FAQ postings, drove the first approved community standard, has been on the oversight committee since the beginning, etc. In other words: Well, duh, who else? Congrats, Bill.

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