This is a bit late, but day 2 of the JCM went pretty well. There still is a sense of the need to spread the word about Jini to the rest of the world as well as the need to use Jini as a replacement for J2EE and Web Services. Honestly, I think there are bigger problems to worry about such as the “versioning” problem than worrying about whether or not WebServices is the best or worst technology, but the value of determining where Jini sits is valid.

The problem I think is that most folks don’t think Jini is “plumbing” (i.e. infrastructure) and it is. It’s kinda like a VIP or the clustering support for J2EE containers. It’s main purpose is to distribute across physical machine boundaries and not that much more. Of course folks will say that it does security and remote invocation and a whole suite of other things, but under all that, it’s just a distribution mechanism. Therefore, it plays really nice with J2EE and with WebServices. There’s no reason why Jini can’t co-exist. I say we take a step back (and a step forward, and a step back…) and get back to the hard problems.

As for the need to spread the word, well, I’ll let the marketing folks handle that. I like Jini and think it solves some problems, but has others as well. I think it should be used where it makes sense and ignored where it doesn’t. If Sun thinks it is the wave of their future, they are probably the only ones that are going to make enough noise to get it going, but I could be wrong. I say that because from what I see the Jini community for the most part likes the quiet.