Post a Comment On: Network of Things

So I keep getting asked why not use Jini for grid discovery and Jxta for network independence in grids. Most of the folks who asks actually are not able to tell me what is the distinction between Jini and Jxta. Anybody have a real simple way of explaining? I will give it a try below

Jini is a technology for communication in a distributed computing environment. At the time it was formulated, platform independence was all the craze and thus Jini was born to essentially make RPC platform dependent. But like Java platform it is dependent on the Java language. Like RPC, I believe Jini's communication model is synchronous. The new JavaSpaces builds on top to give a shared memory asynchronous model for communication.

Jxta is a technology for extending distributed computing across a WAN which by definition is heterogeneous. Therefore Jxta involves network protocol routing and is based on asynchronous communication. The problem I see is that it does not use existing IP infrastructure for addressing and therefore not very scalable.

If doing a global grid, I would just move to globus. It solves most of these issues and has a wider following.