A Framework for the Integration of Legacy Devices into a Jini Management Federation.

Gerd Aschemann, Svetlana Domnitcheva, Peer Hasselmeyer, Roger Kehr, Andreas Zeidler

The administration of heterogeneous networks with many devices is a tedious and time-consuming task. Today's approaches only provide static configuration files and make the addition and removal of devices a manual chore. In this paper we present a framework for the integration of legacy devices based on Jini, Sun Microsystem's new technology for federating network devices and services. We introduce extended proxy objects called nannies that care for non-Jini-enabled devices and handle the relevant management events, guide a device through bootstrapping, register it with the lookup service, and provide the implementation of the administrative interfaces for the Jini API. Through this approach both Jini-enabled and legacy devices can be handled homogeneously in a Jini Management Federation.