Generally speaking; It is not dead-easy to get Jini systems up and running, particularly it seems that people have problems with;
1. Codebase management. 2. Proper equals() and hashCode(). 3. Connection management. 4. Fallback strategies. There is nothing today stopping you from creating a Merlin-capable component that connects to a Jini Federation and participate as full peer. You need to take care of the above (and some more). Except for 4. Merlin could handle the rest behind the scenes in a fairly robust manner, and communicate this to the AvailabilityAware component, which has to figure out what to do when Availibility is gone. Such component would see the Jini Federation as a local system, and in fact couldn't tell whether the Jini service it connects to is a Jini service or just an ordinary component. It wouldn't have to worry about connection handling, how to create distributed accurate hashCode() and equals() and how to obtain the codebases required for the ServiceProxy and so on. It would be fairly easy to Jini enable your apps, just make sure that the components are AvailabilityAware and have a 'fallback strategy' defined. That is the first step. Secondly, a JiniAware service, would need to be able to register its own ServiceProxy, and the question here arises whether this is generically useful, and perhaps not Jini specific at all, plainly Distributed specific. That needs to be investigated in some greater detail with a few use-cases. I see that the Availability contract has so much benefits that it will find its way into the standard Avalon Framework (v5, I guess) in due time, whereas Jini connectivity and other distributed technologies will become Merlin Facilities which you can enable. Time frame for all of this; "this year" perhaps. Niclas -- +---------//-------------------+ | http://www.bali.ac | | http://niclas.hedhman.org | +------//----------------------+ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
