Generic Adaptation of Jini Services

-In the network-centric computing paradigm the net gains more importance. Software and hardware components, often abstracted as services, form an application that is distributed over the network and only loosely coupled. Clients that depend on those services communicate remotely and download the necessary code they need. Jini is a framework, based on Java that provides an infrastructure for network-centric computing. A Jini environment is a collection of interacting Java programs, called services, which are distributed over a network, and which need to register themselves with the Jini lookup service (LUS). The LUS works like the yellow pages allowing clients to lookup services. An exact type match between the service interface registered with the LUS and the one requested by the client is needed for a lookup. Therefore a client cannot use a service integrated into the network, which does not match a known interface. The adapter pattern applied to Jini services solves this problem by creating adapters for services unknown to the clients. An adapter implements the known interface making it accessible by the client and operating as a link between the client and the unknown service. Since manually creating these adapters would result in a redundant coding effort, we propose using a tool, called the Generic Adapter, which combines automatic adaptation and adaptation requiring user interaction as strategies to facilitate the adapter creation. An intuitive graphical user interface reduces the effort for the user to a minimum allowing drag-and-drop operations to define mapping relations and to simply add custom code. The Generic Adapter tool can be easily integrated into a networkcentric architecture like Jini. Service adaptation is performed on the basis of Java Reflection, XML or Javadoc service descriptions, and the mapping relations, which are either automatically determined or specified by the user, and which are stored in a central mapping table.