I'm a bit swamped at the moment, but my requirements for jini look like
this:
1) provide means to allow NAT-ed clients to provide services.
2) create an identity provisioning service
I have a way to provide issue 1 right now, but i'm not happy about it.
Its a star network with HTTP as a transport layer. The intention is to
create a service to act as a nat-service-proxy, with a mailbox style
rendezvous. The NAT-ed service polls the mailbox. The client connects to
the service-proxy. The protocol would be message based, with messages
method-call and method-reply. I'm thinking about abstracting the
serialization from a suitable transport in order to find the message
boundaries. (i'm a little suspicious: why didn't the sun jini team do this?)
The intention for issue 2 is to provide a service whereby a client can
request an identity (or group membership) certificate and use this
certificate for incoming and outgoing connections from that point on.
Acceptance of the identity request will be done by the GUI or another
outside system, providing the acceptor with a secret in order to verify
identity via outside channels (think of bluetooth pairing).
My JXTA for Jini attempt is shelved. The JXTA production release from a
few months ago was non-functional for my deployment scenario
(HTTP-only), the HEAD release had stall problems during connection
setup. The effort seems to be big compared to building the functionality
needed with Jini alone.
Gr. Sim
P.S. for UDP a messagetype method-call-without-reply might be possible.
