Monitoring Component Interaction in Jini Federations

Jini is an infrastructure for spontaneous ad hoc service networks. It allows clients to find services without prior knowledge of their network surroundings. For service interaction proxy objects are used which are supplied by service providers. These proxy objects interact directly with the service provider. Compared to architectures that use a virtually central communications broker (like a CORBA ORB or an e-speak Core), this method offers a large amount of flexibility in the selection of an appropriate communication protocol. On the downside, debugging a distributed application using this approach is rather hard, as the interactions between clients and servers are not visible. This paper describes an approach using Java’s dynamic proxies that allows component interaction in a Jini federation to be traced. By putting the functionality into the Jini lookup service, the approach is generic and transparent for both services and clients.