Appendix A. A Note on Distributed Computing

Note on Distributed Computing describes the environment for which the Jini architecture is designed—one of failure characteristics unknown in local computing. The Jini architecture takes these differences into account in its original design principles, which is one reason why the overall Jini architecture works.

This note was originally published as a Sun Microsystems Laboratories technical report (SMLI TR-94-29). The note has been reformatted for this book. Two observations have been added, marked as ^[A] and ^[B] in the text, and presented at the end of the note.

Jim Waldo, Geoff Wyant, Ann Wollrath, and Sam Kendall