Wrapping Jini Services in ActiveX
The introduction of JINI by Sun Microsystems has created a spur in the world of Distributed Computing and technology gurus forecast the relevance of this technology for tomorrow. The trend seems to be focus shifting from a PC centric approach to Network centric. This paper illustrates how the JINI services can be encapsulated as an ActiveX component and made to run over a Windows Platform. The basic idea approached to create the system is to create Java Bean that exposes the required Jini service APIs and this bean can be converted into an ActiveX component using the Java Bean Bridge.
The Java Bean Bridge is a component that comes along with JRE and as the name goes, it acts as bridge between an ActiveX component and the Java Bean. Initially when a Bean has to be converted into an ActiveX then an ActiveX Packager is used to create an OCX(OLE Control Extension) and its corresponding TLB (Type LiBrary)file. The ActiveX Packager also gives the developer the provision whether the ActiveX control should be registered in the local machine and also generates the .reg (Registry install) file which could be used for installing in another machine.
When any component that has been developed using the bean bridge is used in an environment, the component contains the references and methods to start the JRE. During the initialization of the ActiveX component the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) is loaded along with the JRE. The bean that was packed as an OLE is also launched in the JRE memory space.
