Internet World: Sun whips up Jini support

Sun Microsystems Inc. is busy ramping up support for its Jini distributed computing architecture and will show off some of the first fruits of its labor in a demonstration with manufacturing partners in December, according to John Gage, chief scientist at Sun Labs, in an Internet World keynote address in New York on October 7.

The problem with a networked world

Gage was joined on the stage by Sun’s vice president of research, Bill Joy, to extol the virtues of Jini and explain why it is necessary to cut down on software complexity as a range of consumer goods from CD players to cars become networked.

To help make his point, Gage walked on stage with a video camera, hooked it to his laptop computer and showed the mess of wires linking computers to the Internet backstage, which he had videotaped a minute before.

“Does that look consumer-grade?” Gage asked. As he reinforced the point by training the camera on the back of the podium to show a similar tangle, the connection between the camera and the Windows-based laptop fell. “Come on, Microsoft,” he quipped.

That failed connection underscores the point that as consumer goods become networked, they need reliable, simple connections to be accepted, Gage noted.

How Jini can help out

Jini, Sun’s Java-based distributed computing software, is designed to make it easier for developers to build networks where any device can be represented as a software object, Gage said. Jini look-up services accomplish the task of linking devices to various geographically dispersed network services they need.

Jini-enabled devices incorporate a “stub” of less than 40 kilobytes of code, which communicates through another piece of code providing a look-up service on the network, to connect the device to various services, Sun officials have explained previously.

“What direction do we go…to get to something that’s powerful, safe, and distributed where the number of connected devices are not a million or a hundred million but the numbers are in billions,” Gage said. “Every air conditioner, every automobile will have intelligence in it,” he said.

To demonstrate that manufacturers are actually buying into the concept, Sun officials will appear with manufacturing “partners” at a conference in New York in December and present demonstrations involving consumer electronics devices as well as automobile components, Gage said.

“We’ll be here in December with our partners and talk about availability,” he said.

Sun has ready in its labs a demonstration of a brake built by one manufacturer being controlled by an auto component built by another car maker.

Sun lines up Jini partners

Gage said that Quantum Corp., a hard-drive maker, and Seagate Software Inc., a backup software company, are writing Jini objects for their peripheral devices, but he did not specify major consumer electronic or automobile manufacturers. Sun executives have been roaming the globe to drum up support for Jini among manufacturers, and Joy was in Japan recently to enlist a range of companies there.

Sun gives away Jini code for free but charges a royalty when it is incorporated in devices that are sold.

“These (consumer) companies write Jini objects, embed them into processors on their devices, and then when the devices get hooked up to the network they say, `Hey, here I am, this is how you [use me],'” Gage said.

This simplifies today’s connections between computers and external devices, eliminating the need, for example, for different device drivers for different printers. Simplicity is also a requirement for connecting home devices, noted Joy.

“Imagine having 100 PCs embedded in your house…and the time you’d have to spend on system administration,” Joy said.

“Jini is the first software architecture designed for the age of the Internet,” Joy said. “HTML [Hypertext Markup Language] is about connecting computers to people, but what we don’t have is software for computers to talk to computers.”

The Jini distributed computing model makes sense as a way to cut down the complexity of networking in a wide range of computing and consumer products, said Jerry Frame, a free-lance programmer based in Emerson, NJ, who attended the keynote.

“But they need peripheral companies to use it before it truly becomes workable, so what we need to see is who is actually going to be using it in their products,” Frame said.

Sun is aiming to answer this question in December, Gage said.

–Marc Ferranti is a correspondent with the IDG News Service