Tuesday, March 09, 2004

WS-Discovery and Jini

News.com and Ron Schmelzer have once again teamed up to inform the public on web service specifications:



Ws-disc and Jini have a discovery component and Jini is a 'java' only thing. A couple other things worth noting:
1. Sun made a huge mistake by not bundling Jini with the J2EE stack early - this killed Jini - it was considered a 'device only' api.
2. Jini is API not a protocol - they later rewrote this functionality as a protocol for Jxta
3. Jini bundled remedies to concerns (leasing, discovery, proxy, service matching and tuple space) in a single spec.

My belief is that ws-discovery will catch on as long as people don't say, "The idea is very much the same as Jini". As cool as Jini was, it was doomed by Sun. If you want to describe ws-discovery, say "it's a multicast framework for dynamically finding resources on a net (wan, lan, scatternet, piconet, etc.) without knowing the address of any resources ahead of time."

WS-Discovery isn't bundling a ton of things together - it is a lightweight protocol for finding stuff across a variety of networks. It isn't based on a single language and has good support. It can make it - as long as we don't accidentally kill it in the cradle.

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