What Jini is not
- Jini is not a name server
Jini keep track of the services known within a community, uses the
Jini lookup facilities, which provide funcionality similar to a name
server. But Jini is much more. It is a paradigm for building distributed
systems that support spontaneous appearance and disappearance in a
community, and the ability to self-heal when things go wrong.
- Jini is not JavaBeans
JavaBeans provides a way for software components, called beans, to find
each other, use services provided by other beans. But beans is largely
intended for use within a single address space. Communication between
beans are based on direct method invocation, not remote protocol. The
beans model, flexible as it is, is also far less dynamic than Jini.
- Jini is not RMI
While Jini uses RMI extensively, particularly its facilities for
mobile code, Jini is a set of services and conventions built atop RMI. As
such, services that speak Jini can enjoy the full benefits of Jini’s
spontaneous networking and self-healing abilities.
- Jini is not a Distributed Operating System
In some way, it is much larger than a distributed operating system,
because pieces of it must run atop some platform that provides a JVM at a
minimun, but in other ways, it is much smaller, the facilities offered and
the concepts used by Jini are very limited. Jini only has the notion of
services, and the facilities for finding those services.