Sun Jini & HP JetSend : Integrating Disparate Communication Technologies
Sun announced its Jini technology this year with lots of fan fare about device federations. The term can be understood under a plug-and-play mechanism for network devices that enable cooperation and direct communication between devices. This essentially means that you can plug a device into a network and it will be recognized and ready for instant use. Jini uses the term discovery and lookup, a set of protocols by which devices are readied for this purpose. The distributed programming model of Jini is actually a co-ordination model, which can be used by most device software to "federate". The model or the concept itself is orthogonal to the device software implementation. That is to say, a well designed co-ordination model can be incorporated into almost any network enabled device allowing it to cooperate with other devices on the network. This idea essentially stems from the idea of co-ordination languages, first put forth in a programming system known as Linda from the Yale university. The Tuple Spaces and concepts of Linda are found reflected in Sun's Jini. Unfortunately, Jini is almost fully tied to Java which makes Java or embedded Java almost essential on the devices.
While Sun focused on the co-ordination aspect in device-to-device communication, HP on the other hand focused on the data content encoding , negotiation and conversion aspects with its HP JetSend technology - a very important distinction. Jini does not define the data content types or the negotiations that can take place between devices. Once two devices engage, any dialogue between them is device dependent.
In contrast, a JetSend enabled device can communicate with any other JetSend enabled device, negotiate and encode data in the best form of representation and transfer this data over the network in a controlled manner - without having any other device (like a PC) coming in between. For example, you can take a photograph with a digital camera, walk up to a printer and "squirt" the image to paper. Or scan a color image on a JetSend enabled scanner and send it as Fax to a destination across the world (check out the Calsoft Labs HP JetSend Fax gateway and other tools at our website)....
