Lego Mindstorms Controlled by Pilot Via JINI

Nobody writes "JavaSoft has a cool article on how they've used their JINI technology to allow a Palm Pilot to control a Lego Mindstorms brick. " The scary thing is that this is one of the more useful applications of Java I've seen...

Comments

Cellphone printing to Bangkok

[Neville]

It's fine to be cynical of Sun's marketing of java, but it's silly to by cynical of the enterprise changes it's undergone over the past year. When will people talk about the actual apps, and not just lump all java stuff together because they're written in the same tongue?

Anyway, java is highly useful for things like quickly developing complex object and service distribution. For example, encapsulating a service (like a printer in Bangkok, say, wrapped in a java object referenced as an interface), sticking it in a naming directory (could be iiop-based, could be rmi-based, could be something similar to ldap -- java can do it all in a very similar way), and then obtaining a reference to that object and calling its methods from ANY client (an embedded applet on a cellphone, for example) -- this is very cool stuff, and lumping it into the same category as tickertape applets just because they're both java is annoying and ignorant. Should we lump all C stuff together just because it's done in the same language?

The primary advantage of doing all this in java is not platform independence as much as extremely rapid (thus less costly) development.

All this is not to say that any of this will run across linux -- based on Gosling's comments here last week, java will run with these legos and on Palm Pilots better than any linux port for the foreseeable future.