Rub the oil lamp, so the legend has it, and out will pop a jini: a mystical, malevolent creature with the unfortunate habit of getting trapped in lamps and being washed ashore.
The moral? From something seemingly ordinary can spring something extraordinary: and what could be more mundane than computers, consisting as they do largely of beige boxes. They don't seem to do anything particularly wonderful other than sort your wedding list, or let you send email to your grumpy sister in Melbourne.
But take a look around your kitchen. Microprocessors abound, from the clock in your microwave to the thermostat in your dishwasher. In essence, these are all computers too. Why shouldn't they be talking?
Welcome to Jini, the new wonder technology from Sun Microsystems, built on Java and intended to bring transparent networking to everything from vending machines to supercomputers. If it works, it'll be huge and will mark a shift in how we perceive networking and redefine what we consider computing.
What Java is to software - a shared, universal language - Jini hopes to be for the machines which run it: an overarching, universal operating system that can be used by pretty much anything containing a microprocessor. With Jini, devices can affordably contain processors powerful enough to allow them to self-install, self-organise into communities, self-configure, and self-diagnose; a community can then be built out of the most common appliances such as TVs, DVDs, cameras, radios, and mobile phones.
And once they can talk, they can start being useful. A car could hook into a city's Jini network to find parking or restaurants, your fridge could order more milk before you run out, or a washing machine could be remotely fixed by a Jini-savvy repairman.
Sun's dream is that anything into which you can stuff a Java virtual machine ought to be networked. And the beauty of the idea is that, since every Jini device is inherently networked, Jini devices automatically connect themselves. They look for a network connection, and if it's there, they do the best job their tiny brains can, to figure out how to talk to it - all without asking for IP addresses, subnet masks, or human help of any sort. The technology reduces dependence on system administrators, lowers support costs and allows impromptu device communities to assemble in places far from the traditional office.
The boast is that Jini's underlying technology and architecture is powerful enough to build a fully distributed system on a network of workstations, but flexible enough to work with the most mundane of appliances. It'll only work if Sun manage to convince manufacturers to sign up to the standard. And that's a big if. Fax machines and board games share an economic quirk: each new one sold adds to the value of the rest. A fax machine isn't worth much if there aren't others to communicate with; board games aren't much fun if no one else knows how to play.
Thus the whole adds to the value of each of its parts. This is the theory of network externalities - a term for the effect one person's decision to buy into a network has on others who are still thinking of buying in. And it's been the internet's rocket fuel: the more people who connect, the more valuable a connection becomes. It is the only way that Jini can hope to succeed.
Sun loves Jini because it's a practical validation of their Java language, and because it will get right up Microsoft's nose. Bill Gates is perfectly happy for your can-opener to have networking capability, but he wants a PC running Windows to be at the centre of it, and therefore to have Microsoft running your kitchen. Sun's approach is to let the little Jini devices talk peer-to-peer when it makes sense, and to remove the need for a local computer. The success of Jini would signal the end of today's operating system tyranny - another reason not to expect Microsoft to be dancing in the aisles.
Philosophically, this marks an evolution from computing as we are used to it - monitor, mouse, keyboard, operating system - to a smoother and more sensible integration of computers into our daily lives. No bad thing.
If Jini ultimately succeeds, it will provide the sort of connections that will make the internet of today seem confining and restrictive, and could become the foundation for truly networked, global computing. All the technology you interact with on a daily basis will come under Jini's spell.
Ultimately we'll wonder how we ever got through life without being able to run the bath or tape ER by making a simple phone call home. A case of the little things making all the difference.
www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.08/jini ted.felton@mdimedia.com