What is Jini?
Jini is a set of APIs and runtime conventions that facilitate the building and deploying of distributed systems. Jini provides “plumbing” that takes care of common but difficult parts of distributed systems. Jini consists of a programming model and a runtime infrastructure. By defining APIs and conventions that support leasing, distributed events, and distributed transactions, the programming model helps developers build distributed systems that are reliable, even though the underlying network is unreliable. The runtime infrastructure, which consists of network protocols and APIs that implement them, makes it easy to add, locate, access, and remove devices and services on the network. For a detailed introduction to Jini, see: http://www.artima.com/jiniology/intro.
Answer Jini is an architecture for distributed computing. In particular, it addresses how to provide object services to clients, and how these clients find available services. Jini differs from other distributed object systems in that the services are assumed to be transient and the network unreliable. In other words, in a dynamic distributed environment clients and services come and go; the Jini architecture deals with this as a “normal” situation, instead of failing. The Jini architecture is especially useful for mobile devices, since these can be expected to join and leave the network with regularity. However, Jini is just as useful in a more traditional client-server situation, where both the client and the server are software processes. You can learn more about the Jini architecture by reading some of the white papers and documention found at http://www.sun.com/jini/ and at http://www.jini.org/.
