JavaSpaces(TM) Principles, Patterns, and Practice

A Programmer's Guide to Jini Technology

Distributed

The Jini(TM) Specifications, Edited by Ken Arnold (2nd Edition)

Format: Paperback
Author: Jim Waldo
ReleaseDate: 15 December, 2000
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Rating:

More than a Specification
Think of it as a primer on how to use Jini the way the people who developed Jini intended (rather than as a spec). I put off buying this for about a year because I was fooled by the title. That makes it very useful. Not ideal for someone who is considering using Jini and wants an overview, but a great "second book" on Jini. Similar to Keith Edwards' Jini "Example by Example".

More than a Specification
Think of it as a primer on how to use Jini the way the people who developed Jini intended (rather than as a spec). I put off buying this for about a year because I was fooled by the title. That makes it very useful. Not ideal for someone who is considering using Jini and wants an overview, but a great "second book" on Jini. Similar to Keith Edwards' Jini "Example by Example".

Good but lacking

I don't understand why Sun Microsystems, on their website and in thier books, (and this book is no exception) do not use UML to describe their libraries and frameworks. Since it has so many glowing reviews, I'll give it a review that may be uselful to the authors for future additions. I, for one, learn a lot about dependencies and collaborations between classes when UML is employed. In the sections that have real code examples, it would be helpful to have a snippet of UML describing the section of Jini critical to that example, for instance.

Furthermore, in the earlier sections of the book, the overview, the authors use what I call "system collaboration diagrams", even better would be when they are explaining code snippets to highlight in their system collaboration diagrams what part of the system they are showing an example of.

I guess I just found the explaination of the examples lacking. The examples themselves are excerpted, making them hard to follow. For instance, it is confusing to see an ordinary method being called (from within an excerpt) with no class or object qualified before it. Is it in the superclass? In the implementation? If in the superclass, how far up? This is especially difficult when referring to the DEM of Java, which sometimes seems counterintuitive to beginners.

My rule of thumb is one should never look at a piece of code and get "nervous" about what a symbol or method is supposed to be doing there.