Arieh's Weblog

In the context of the activities I am involved at work, I am researching network registration and lookup services, primarily from the perspective of systems, network and storage administration.

The goal is to be able to identify the resources involved (be them software entities, hardware components) in order to obtain their Service Access Point, (SAP) and utilize them within the application.

The Network Storage world, through its SMI-S initiative, has declared SLP (Service Location Protocol) as the means by which advertisement of the points of presence (CIM Object Managers) is done.

There are limitations to using SLP in that context, some related to the ability to perform multicast and traversal across subnets. Others, to the fact that a dependency exists on the availability of an SLP Daemon on the network. One last limitation is related to the CIM/WBEM implementation, which refers to the SAP being the whole CIMOM.

Jini provides an alternative solution that addresses several of the shortcomings that I can see in the SLP implementation selection. Past limitations of multicast have been removed with the Lincoln Tunnel delivered within the RIO project. One could consider the Java-bound nature of Jini a limitation. Such limitation may be manifested when needing to satisfy a requirement such as the ability to allow components that cannot support a JVM (such as devices with limited capabilities).

JXTA appears to be a technology that can help address the problems I need to tackle. JXTA provides non-Java bindings which would allow the development of JXTA peers embedded in Real Time Operating Systems (where J2SE and even J2ME are not available). JXTA provides also for the ability to not be limited to TCP/IP connectivity (a need that is featured in the storage world, with parallel SCSI, Fibre Channel as some of the non-IP based technologies), as evidenced with the connectivity to Bluetooth.

I will defer to many of the other bloggers who are much more conversant and familiar with it.

I admit that I have not mentioned Zeroconf as one of the possible solutions, mainly because of its focus on the IP Networking area. I have also omitted mention of Apple Rendezvous as a possible solution, for similar reasons.

I'd be interested to hear from your own experiences in this area.