Enhancing JINI to support nonJAVA appliances

With their introduction of the JAVA Intelligent Network Infrastructure, more commonly referred to as JINI, SUN Microsys-tems has presented a new and versatile way to design distributed systems. Based upon the consequent enforcement of only a small number of design principles (here especially discovery, lookup and leasing), JINI gives the means to create exible, dynamic and robust application scenarios. Still, there is a huge drawback from the application designer's point of view: So far, JINI and its core component, the Lookup Service, are based on the assumption that all participants of a JINI scenario are JAVAenabled. Especially with mobile system applications, this won't be realistic for some time to come and as even nonJAVA parties will gain a lot from being part of JINI scenarios, it is necessary to nd enhancements to make them do so. This article describes a generic strategy to integrate nonJAVA parties into the JINI architecture, which provides a possibility to integrate arbitrary nonJAVA devices into the JINI community