Sun, Jxta And Promises

A reader writes: "There's a publically available article on the WSJ online regarding Sun and the Jxtra launch. But the interesting part is the spin on Jxta as Jini, essentially repackaged. The article also gets into Jxta trying to ride on the coattails of the 'p2p' success. Good article."

Comments

Another relevant article on JXTA

[Sanity]

The Trouble with JXTA is Adam Langley's (a freenet developer) take on JXTA for OpenP2P.com.

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Re:Interesting, but no point...

[smileyy]

a freshman CS major can probably do a decent job of [writing a peer-to-peer app]

You overestimate 95% of freshman CS majors.

Interesting, but no point...

[TWR]

I downloaded the Jxta docs the day it came out, and as I was looking through it,

Sun seems to have forgotten the reason why Java took off. Java was doing something amazing in 1995. There was a tiny program running in a browser, and the same program running on both Windows and Solaris. This was something new. Of course, applets haven't worked so well in non-trivial cases, but it got interest going in Java.

Compare this to Jxta. What does Jxta let me do that nothing else can do? Writing a P2P app isn't rocket science; a freshman CS major can probably do a decent job of it. Maybe if Sun had released the Jxta killer app along with Jxta, it might be more interesting. For now, though, it looks like it's probably going to fizzle out.

-jon

Re:JINI patented, expensive.

[lgraba]

No, as I recall, the license fees for Jini only kicked in when you started selling devices with Jini on them, and then it was only to the tune of $0.10 per device, or a one-time fee of $100,000 or $200,000 for those who would be selling millions of devices. These fees have recently been removed completely.

I don't know about an open source version of Jini, but I do know that there is a vendor that has built an independant version of Jini (http://www.prosyst.com), and another company that built an independant Jini Look-up server. Sun didn't squash those efforts.

I agree with Bill Venners, who was quoted in the article. Sun marketed Jini as an infrastructure that would tie together all sorts of devices. The trouble was, it is still the case that you need a lot of RAM and ROM on a node to host Jini, unless you use some sort of surrogate architecture. With arrival of the Connected Device Configuration (CDC) and the expected arrival of the RMI profile, you soon will be able to host Jini on smaller devices but it still will take 2-3 meg. of memory.

I also think that it is premature to dismiss Jini as a failure. I am seeing more and more products in the pipeline that are using Jini, and it is also seeing more use in enterprise-type applications. Did it take over the world? No. Is it being abandoned by early adopters? Again I think, no.

I think that the above post is yet another reason to not rely on a Slashdot posting for your information. There may be some gems, but the above posting has a pretty low accuracy level.

JINI patented, expensive.

[kbonin]

Java took off in part because it was free. One of the reason JINI flopped so hard, unlike Java, was that it was a technology tied to licensing agreements intended to make Sun money.

They patented key aspects of their discovery and RPC mechanism, and developers I know who wanted to use it in products paid license fees starting in the tens of thousands of $.

Sun even squashed an open source developer trying to distribute a free version of JINI.

JXTA is their attempt to get back mindshare and clout in the agent space, where other P2P groups have left them far behind. Its still insufficient for most interesting applications.

The Sun problem

[Animats]

Sun has more launches than landings. Too much of their new stuff goes away, rather than reaching a solid, usable state. This is a problem.

Remember Jini?

Re:P2P, the "push" of 2001

[Wesley Felter]

Yeah, P2P is such a worthless fad -- wait, where did all these MP3s on my computer come from?

P2P, the "push" of 2001

[Ars-Fartsica]

Lets examine all of the scam fad watchwords of the modern internet era:

1997 - Personalization

1998 - Push

1999 - Streaming Media

2000 - WAP

2001 - P2P

Next year it will be the "X Internet". You can safely avoid all of these fads and still enjoy a healthy networked computing experience.

Hmmm...

[jonfromspace]

My company is involved in the JXTA innitiative, and while JXTA is not much to holler about yet, it is on its way. To have a set of protocols that allow not only groups of peers on a network to communicate, but other networks outside that group to interact, is a HUGE step for not only Peer-to-Peer technology, but for networking as a whole. While the jury is still out on the success of JXTA, it is projects like this that will shape the future of networking as a whole.

Personally, I like it. But it will be up to the JXTA community to make it a reality. So far, their is progress, but still a ton of work to do.