James Gosling: on the Java Road
Tuesday September 18, 2007
Hanging out with printer engineers
I'm spending this week at the
Ricoh Developers Conference.
They have Java VMs in their big printers that enable developers to build
applications into the printers. They are often specialized workflow management
apps. If you were at JavaOne, you saw a simple (but valuable) one: print a document from
your laptop, it goes to a master spool server, then walk over to any printer, stick in your badge, and out
comes your document. When everything is on the network, the possibilities
for end-to-end synergies are endless [Yuck: on re-reading that sentence, it's
pretty clear that I've been spending too much time with marketoids].
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I'm trying to picture endless end-to-end synergies ;-)
Posted by 203.36.157.8 on September 18, 2007 at 11:26 PM PDT #
Yes nice Mr. Gosling, but when are we going to see printer drivers based on Java? This was the original dream of the JINI initiative, now we are nearer to this objective because current printers are real computers and most of them are based on USB (low end of course), which offers a richer way to communicate with the device.
I think this may work: Java requests the Java driver to the printer, the printer returns the driver by USB (may be platform dependent) and our Java program talks with the printer using this driver. Of course there could be three options: talk with the printer using a custom API, or talking to the printer using Java Print or with a new JDBC-inspired wrapper, the last one is very interesting because the printer could notify us using listeners (no paper etc).
Regards
Posted by Jose M. Arranz on September 20, 2007 at 02:02 AM PDT #
Interesting stuff from Ricoh.
What do you think about the following scenario?
Its about Jini.
http://mayuresh.kathe.in/index.php?pid=6
Posted by Mayuresh Kathe on September 20, 2007 at 09:45 AM PDT #