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"Jini in a Nutshell," by Scott Oaks and Henry Wong, is another excellent O'Reilly & Associates Nutshell book, one aimed at introducing us to Sun's Java-based Jini, described by the authors as "a set of specifications that enables services to discover each other on a network and that provides a framework that allows those services to participate in certain types of operations." In other words, if, in the not-too-distant future, your refrigerator decides to have a heart-to-heart with your web camera, it won't have much difficulty looking the camera up on the network and invoking services from it, as long as both entities have currently registered Jini services. You might call it "Widgets for Workgroups".
"Jini in a Nutshell" is divided into two parts: "Introducing Jini", a 200-page tutorial, and a "Quick Reference" of approximately equal length, which expresses the authors' rich practical insights into minute details of the relevant services and packages. "Quick Reference" may be a misnomer. The Sun Javadocs on Jini are a quick reference; "Jini in a Nutshell" contains much more.
After the "Quick Start", which instructs you how to run the toolchain that comes with Jini, the next subject is RMI. The authors take us up through local and remote services to activatable services, and illustrate how to proxy remote object services to be mostly independent of the RMI protocol itself.
Next is "Basic Jini Programming," which extends the RMI examples to become Jini services. "Leasing" shows how services must interact with Jini's concept of keep-alive. "Remote Events" implements listeners for callbacks. "Service Administration" illuminates the exposed APIs that allow administration of Jini services. "Miscellaneous Classes" introduces utility classes of the com.sun.jini packages. "Transactions" covers Jini's transaction API. Next is a section about the JavaSpaces Service, a persistent object store designed as a Jini service. "Helper Services" covers features such as the lease renewal service and the mailbox service, and also presents as a fully activatable Jini service the example that the reader has followed throughout the book. "Security in Jini" covers (somewhat lightly) the subject of policy and policy files.
Originally printed in March 2000, and reprinted with minor corrections in May 2000, "Jini in a Nutshell" has already become version-challenged, if only slightly, with the release of JDK 1.3, which changed the rules for the RMI daemon. (You now have to point to a security policy file for rmid, as in
rmid -J-Djava.security.policy=/foo/bar/java.policy.all
which was not a requirement in 1.2). JDK 1.3 wasn't stable when the book was revised for reprint. What's an author to do? In any event, the web page for the book, (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/jininut/), has corrections and updates, including corrections submitted by readers but awaiting author verification, as well as the source for the examples found in the book.
The authors of "Jini in a Nutshell" are experienced at living up to the high expectations of O'Reilly readers. Scott Oaks, a Java technologist at Sun Microsystems, is the author of "Java Security" and coauthor of "Java Threads", both from O'Reilly. Henry Wong, a tactical engineer at Sun Microsystems, is a coauthor of "Java Threads" from O'Reilly. Jini is yet another interesting expansion of Sun's Java empire, and "Jini in a Nutshell" is worthwhile introduction to Jini.
-- Jack J. Woehr (http://www.well.com/~jax/rcfb)
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