Professional Jini

Rating:
Summary: Your the man Sing
Review: After looking at all the JINI books available except the O'Reilly one, I found this book to be best....by far!
If you want to learn peer to peer computing, start with this book at page one and read all the way through...you will not be dissapointed.
It has everything, great on code...it will show you how to code JINI, philosophy, ideas, implementations etc...

Sing...when are you going to publish again??? You are great!
If you do, I hope its a topic that I need..

Thanks
- Adam

Rating:
Summary: Thorough uptodate intro to Jini with advanced examples
Review: I had the pleasure of reading Sing Li's Pro Jini as a technical reviewer for Wrox press. The book provides a thorough introduction to the Jini system architecture and Sun's reference implementation. Coverage is uptodate with the latest Jini 1.1 API specification and reference implementation from Sun, including all the new Jini helper utilities and services. What further sets this book apart from other Jini offerings is the inclusion of solutions to practical Jini deployment issues. For example, the book discusses extensively the issues arising from deploying Jini in a firewalled environment, and presents examples for securing Jini using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) communication. Relevant Java technologies such as RMI and object serialization are also clearly introduced early on. The appendices complement Sun's documentation by presenting the Jini APIs and reference services while highlighting common pitfalls. Overall this is an excellent tutorial and reference that will enable programmers to quickly get up and running with Jini and then lead them on to advanced Jini programming issues.

Rating:
Summary: Lots of material and code
Review: I used this book in parallell with other books.

Chapters on networking and RMI were very useful.

It helped me to understand Jini, though I got a lot of help reading other textbooks in parallell.

Issues on agent techonology were very interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Lots of material and code
Review: I used this book in parallell with other books.

Chapters on networking and RMI were very useful.

It helped me to understand Jini, though I got a lot of help reading other textbooks in parallell.

Issues on agent techonology were very interesting.

Rating:
Summary: A complete, detailed, well-written book
Review: Mr. Li starts out with a section focusing on advanced RMI and CORBA, and how they relate to Jini. The CORBA section includes examples for building a Java client/server using the ORB that comes with the JDK, as well as using a C client on Linux with the free ORBit ORB. An excellent overview of CORBA for people who have never used it or simply haven't used it with Java.

His writing is detailed, explaining how things are done and why they're done that way; after reading this book you will have an excellent understanding of Jini. For example, the detailed discussion and the several examples on UDP multicast and how it is used in the Discovery protocol was quite fascinating. I found the case study chapters, accounts of real-life applications of Jini and JavaSpaces, to be very interesting to read as well.

Overall, an inforative, highly readable book aimed at advanced developers.

Rating:
Summary: Very readable for practitioners
Review: This one of the few tech books I've been able to read easily on an airplane. It's thick (886 pp), but readable. I like the way the source code is broken into greyed boxes, with comments on each section between. Duh! Why read comment code if you don't have to? Thank you. All the pages feel clean and light.
The language is disarmingly simple and straightforward without being mired in pure fact. That's harder than it looks. This book is also the most natural walk-up to discussing Jini that I've read. The author's treatment of dynamic stub downloading, in particular, doesn't worry if the reader can hold the mental process in his head; it explains the concept once, then provides a checklist for putting the sample code in motion. Repetition is the mother of learning.
Take the title seriously; it's for "professional" readers, but take that to mean practitioners of the language and distributed computing. The "aha's" in this book will escape anyone who thinks typing in the code will reveal all. It definitely helps to bring some background to the party.
The typos per page grow as you go, but they're not too distracting. The usual is a missing "the" or "is," but I didn't see one that sacrificed meaning. I hate to concede this point entirely to the reality of whiz-bang technical publishing; I think proofreaders just ain't what they used to be.

Rating:
Summary: Jini development through example and application
Review: Unlike some other reference style books for Jini, this book seeks to support the development of Jini applications by being firmly directed at programmers with an unashamedly practical approach. Not only does it provide adequate coverage of the key concepts and issues involved, but it leads the reader through the details of systems development through extensive and very specific code examples. In this way, devevlopers can review and understand Jini by example, and borrow from the structures presented.

While the core of the book is firmly focussed on Jini technology (and the related JavaSpaces) together with the development utilities and tools that surround it, the complete picture is provided by two other sections that start and end the book.

First, there is an extensive discussion of Java and related networking technologies. This is important in order to situate the discussion of Jini itself and understand its position in the broader computing field. In particular, RMI and CORBA are introduced at the start to provide a context, and to show how they complement Jini on the one hand, and can be used with it on the other. This is very good if your familiarity with these is limited.

Second, the final section contains several application descriptions that show both the kind of applications that might be constructed with Jini, and how the power of Jini can be used in effective and novel ways. These chapters are written by people actually involved in Jini systems development, and describe real systems rather than toy educational examples. Specially interesting to me was the Paradigma agent framework, itself opening up an interesting set of possibilities for further development.

In summary, the book covers background and complementary material, Jini fundamentals and case-studies, all in one coherent whole. Backed up with real code examples throughout, it is an excellent place to start both for the Jini developer and also for those seeking a good source of information on Jini and related technologies. Perhaps most interesting, however, is the variety of illuminating applications that provide a valuable source of ideas and inspiration.