Sun Microsystems is ready to deliver on the notion of the "Internet appliance," making computers and networks as ubiquitous and easy to use as consumer electronics devices.
The company is expected to introduce today a new software technology called Jini that will take the guesswork out of plugging a computer device into a network.
"There's one thing we've all learned from watching Java and the Net," said Sun's Jini product manager Mike Clary in a story in the August issue of Wired magazine. "This can only be an ubiquity play."
Jini promises to make setting up a computer as simple as hooking up a telephone. Should the plan succeed, Sun (SUNW) will write the next chapter of network computing, in which distributed computing -- or processing which is shared across many machines on a common network -- becomes a reality.
Computing power has traditionally resided in both a rich operating system and a desktop PC. Even when computers in this model are networked, they operate as islands in the network stream, accessing applications from the local hard disk to create and edit documents. The ebb and flow of network traffic is limited to the access of shared devices, such as printers.
Over the years, this arrangement has led to a bloated operating system -� Windows 98 requires at least 16 MBs of memory -� and applications so larded with features and capabilities that many consumers don't really know what they do. This model is based on Moore�s Law, which holds that computing power will double every 18 months.
Sun hopes Jini will change all that.
"We know Moore's Law will run out sometime around 2010," Sun co-founder Bill Joy said in the Wired article. "We've been getting a free ride with Moore's Law."
"We can write worse and worse software, and the machines just get faster and faster and cheaper and cheaper �- and they cover our tracks," Joy said.
Jini uses Sun's Java programming language to weave together the collective power and capabilities of devices along a network, be they a supercomputer or the tiniest hybrid cellular phone/computer. This is the essence of distributed computing.
On a Jini-enabled network, all devices will become equals that can provide services to each other. A user who needs some extra processing power to run a palmtop computer application could borrow it from another computer on the network.
Sun says Jini will be able to do this through a part of the architecture called JavaSpace, a type of electronic bulletin board where devices can go to look up functions available to them along a network.
For their own part, devices on the network "announce" themselves by sending information about their capabilities to the bulletin board. So a device such as a palmtop computer, looking to print a document, would call up the bulletin board, see the specs for the printer, and request to be connected to it.
"[Today] if you want to do a transaction, you have to crank up an Oracle database," said Joy. "With JavaSpaces, you have simple transactive communication."
Developers of cellular phones and video cameras are currently working with Jini to incorporate its technology into future devices that can be shared immediately upon hooking up to a network.
In essence, if successful, Jini will tip the scales from large, all-encompassing computers and applications to smaller, specialized programs that are more easily digested by the general consumer. And this could upset the current balance favoring Microsoft, which is building its own distributed architecture program dubbed "Millenium" [Microsoft's misspelling], as well as Intel.
Joy believes Sun has the edge in this arena.
"Any program that is written by hundreds of programmers will inherently be too hard for most people to understand," Joy said of Millenium. "It just has too many features.
"We are better off being a little more decentralized and a little less complicated."
Sun's business plan for Jini boils down to "share the wealth." Part of this strategy includes sharing the source code, or software instruction set, by offering a free license to developers in the hopes of wooing many into Jini�s court.
Already, Sun counts a stable of developers so diverse to include cellular phone maker Ericsson, hard-drive manufacturer Quantum, and printer manufacturer Canon.
The company will also ask for input from developers in the final stages of Jini's development.
This coming Monday, the company plans to post details of Jini to its Web site, and incorporate the resulting feedback into the software's first full release, anticipated by the end of the year.
The full story of Sun's Jini project will appear in the August issue of Wired magazine, on newsstands 28 July.
