The Jini Tools Project

The Jini Tools project was formed to create tools for Java Jini setup, troubleshooting, and development. The original idea was spawned from the "Out of the Box" project at www.jini.org. Discussion will be held on both the normal Jini tools communication channels available through SourceForge, as well as the jini-users mailing list sponsored at jini.org.

The current plan of attack is to work on creating diagnostic testing tools first. These tools are targetted at quickly isolating problems in a Jini runtime environment to ease installation and setup of jini projects.

The second major phase will be creating "wizard" like code generators to eliminate much of the "boiler plate" code needed to get many common Jini services started. Once the infrastructure is in place for this type of code generator, community involvment will hopefully expand the wizard's code generation capabilities to cover most common Jini project types.

The final major initial phase of the jini tool project is to create a standardized, common Jini development environment. I currently envision it as something very similar to (if not actually using) a bash shell, GNU make, and other common unix shell commands (sed, awk, shell scripts, etc). Obviously a pure Java solution is desired but a balance between practicality and functionality must be established.

I would like to thank both SourceForge and Jini.org for their support of their project, as well as the Sun Jini team, especially Ken Arnold. Any questions or comments should be sent to me, Iain Shigeoka (shigeoka@ukans.edu).