The Things That Think (TTT) consortium at the MIT Media Lab have articulated the vision that the next stage of the computer revolution will be the one where they disappear. By this they mean that we are at a stage where our machines will begin to disappear into the background. In their work they have discussed ways in building them into everyday objects and connecting them in pervasive, robust, and distributed networks. These devices can be available constantly in an unobtrusive manner. Sun agrees. Sun has spent a lot of effort on a new technology called Jini. In this talk I will run thru some of the underlying technology of Jini (e.g. RMI, Java) and its core concepts like: leasing, distributed events, javaspaces, transactions, lookup and discovery. We can then open up a discussion on how this either impacts or relates to the construction of "intelligent" software or architectures.
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