Greg Vaughn's Blog

JavaSpaces Still Alive

I've long watched the JavaSpaces and Jini community because it is such a great technology, but sadly from a work experience standpoint, I haven't had a chance to really get my hands dirty. That's still the case, but I have new hope. JPower has released a free (as in beer) JavaSpace JMX component. It runs in any JMX container. It offers hot deployable JavaSpaces, backed by persistent storage via JDBC, and optional security via SSL. Coming in the next release is a Jini services container.

This is a really great (and subversive) idea. I wish I'd thought of it. I'm noticing a lot of work down below the level of J2EE. In some sense, it seems that J2EE has been developed backwards. Servlets came along first which is at the presentation layer, later EJB's came along for business logic. Next came CMP Entity Beans warts and all. Now JDO seems to be taking over the mindshare for persistence. However, the lower layers of infrastructure came later, or at least showed up with very little visibility. JNDI is an important layer that showed up with EJBs. Later came JMX, and then app server vendors worked furiously to build the foundations of their products on JMX. That's where the real low level foundation exists today. Aspect Oriented techniques (or Interceptor oriented if you prefer) are being using to more modularly implement much of these underpinnings.I also hear that Jini is even being used in some places for clustering of the app servers.

The subversive part (and I use that in the fondest sense) is now using JMX to get JavaSpaces and Jini in the picture as peers of the JMX managed web and EJB containers. JPower is the first I've heard of this, but I'll bet it won't take long for other vendors to do the same. Later on Sun might even catch up and make them part of the J2EE spec.

I'm excited that this might be the first step taking JavaSpaces and Jini to the mainstream. Go JPower!

Comments

• Good development for Jini
  I too would love to incorporate jini into one of my projects. It just hasn't been appropriate for any of them yet. I am excited to see this development, as I think it will help acceptance of Jini, which I think is a MUCH better technology for distributed applications than EJB's.

  Posted by: dancingprog on July 30, 2003 at 05:13 AM

• are we ready?
  JavaSpaces or 'tuple space' in general is a DataGrid enabler. Idea of 'space' itself perfectly fits into DataGrid idea as It decouples services/processes around it and acts as a communication bus system with a super-simple interface; write/read/take/notify.

  as the need for distributed computing increases, we will see more interest in JavaSpaces or something similar. Time will come and we will need to make the space available to outside of our organizations, to the world, either via solutions like Web Services or by replacing it with protocol based solutions like JXTA.

  I don't think we have to wait another decade to see the unavoidable need for distributed computing. it is around the corner. are we ready?

  Posted by: talipozturk on July 30, 2003 at 06:02 PM

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