<<Inside the LAN, there are many other alternatives to web services
which may improve our service-oriented environments. They can do this
by increasing network performance through creation of smaller data
sets to transfer, decreasing computational power needed to unmarshall
the data sets, and mobile code in their support of mobile agents and
smart proxies. There are many technology platforms which pose a viable
alternative to web services on the LAN and meet some or all of the
improvements mentioned. One of those technology platforms is Jini.

Jini by itself does not solve the problem but containers built on top
of the Jini platform do. Containers remove some of the Jini
programming complexity by handling codebase downloading and service
deployment. Here are a few example containers:

* Rio - A dynamic services platform which involves a federation of
container nodes onto which services are deployed. Upon deployment of a
service, the platform identifies nodes which meet the service level
agreement (SLA) declared in the Rio deployment descriptor called an
operational string.

* Harvester - A container environment for Jini services and
clients. A particularly interesting feature of Harvester is it's
ability to load services and clients written in the Python language.

* Neon - An agent framework and application grid fabric which
allows your Jini services to be deployed without writing all of the
associated plumbing code. An good introduction to Neon's capabilities
may be found here.

Mobile code is an important reason why Jini is a good alternative to
web services on the LAN. Many Java developers are aware of RMI (remote
method invocation) but have not heard of the Jini RMI impelementation
called JERI (Jini extensible remote invocation). JERI provides
important features over it`s older counterpart: a pluggable transport
layer with security support, an extensible marshalling layer, and
runtime configuration. JERI provides the ability to export your
service proxy for use by a remote service consumer. Your proxy class
may be a "smart" proxy which means that some, if not all, invocation
processing is performed using the consumer`s resources.>>

You can find this blog at:

http://jroller.com/page/csterwa?entry=jini_an_soa_for_the

Gervas