Effortless software interoperability with Jini* connection technology

Abstract

Software components of mixed and uncertain provenance are the reality for large software systems. As such, getting these components to work together to form an integrated software product is vital, but it is made enormously complex by the aggregate system's uncontrolled heterogeneity. This paper focuses on a software integration strategy based on Sun Microsystems' Jini∗ connection technology. Jini had initially been promoted as a technology for interconnecting embedded devices. The ease with which we have been able to use it to accomplish software integration shows that software, whatever its size or age, is really just another “device.” We discuss the reasons why we opted for distributed object technology over other enterprise application integration (EAI) solutions and the advantages of Jini over other distributed object platforms such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA∗) and Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM). We then describe techniques for achieving interoperability between CORBA and Jini and integrating generic “black-box” components. We also discuss the Dobos project, a Jini-based platform for building large distributed applications, and we close with examples showing how to use Dobos to integrate some historically stand-alone applications.