"Distributed Computing with Java+Jini"

Bill Joy
Sun Microsystems

Abstract:
"Since I was a graduate student at Berkeley around 1980 I have wanted more reliable software. Inspired by the Mesa language and safety (gc, etc) in Cedar, and the object-oriented programming of Smalltalk, I worked for about 15 years toward getting the benefits of these languages into the C community, to move the quality of software beyond that which is possible in C. This has largely been achieved with Java.

Now the network age is upon us. My view is that devices and services should be simple, and viewed as objects in an object-oriented language, namely Java. With this view, mobile objects act as agents, and communities of devices and services can be formed, aided by the use of the type system of the programming language. We call the simple platform for distributed programming that we have built around these ideas Jini.

This talk discusses the last 20 years and the next 20, from the age of the PC to the age of ubiquitous/pervasive computing and the role of the Java language and Jini technologies as base technology for the exciting work that lies ahead."

Biography:
BILL JOY is the co-founder and current Vice President for Research at Sun Microsystems and one of the best known evangelists for the open systems model of computing. Before co-founding Sun in 1982, Bill was the principal designer of the University of California, Berkeley, version of the UNIX operating system whose networking protocols and implementations helped spawn the Internet. At Sun he has led technical initiatives for Sun's Network File System, business and technical strategy for the Java programming language and platform, and basic design investigations for UltraSparcTM-IV.