Pragmatic Dictator

Been playing around with REST based systems and http etc recently. Also been pondering how to best make use of web technologies in distributed systems and this popped up on JINI-USERS a while back.

So, the challenge was clear – I wanted to:

1. Expose Jini Services behind a firewall to users outside
2. Build a solution that was web friendly – i.e. used webservers etc
3. Have selective publishing – not all Jini services should be exposed outside the firewall
4. Provide service lookup methods similar to those one uses inside the firewall

Thus, after 4 days of hacking, Sabot is born. An alpha-grade appliance which provides all these abilities to clients outside of a firewall and it’s all done via a webserver on whatever port and http. Codebases are handled correctly so code-downloading is possible. There’s nothing needs to be done to the Jini Service configuration or code, no special magic opening ports on the firewall etc. You should even be able to do forwarding type setups where you have a front-end web-server like Apache forward requests over to Sabot for servicing.

Next up is to release it to a few eager testers and then productization.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Distributed Systems, Jini. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.