It's been online for a little while, but Owen Taylor's "A tale of four verbs: when Objects take a central role" is worth a read for anyone interested in the JavaSpaces API, talking about the four basic methods exposed: read, write, notify, and take, and offering an explanation of how the API might be used. Considering that JavaSpaces is at the heart of commercial offerings like GigaSpaces, an understanding of the techniques behind it might be useful if you're working on or anticipating large-scale applications. Even if the technology isn't what you eventually end up using, knowledge of its capabilities offers a potential architecture to evaluate, and it's been proven in some very rigourous conditions. Other resources:

• Jini.org, a site dedicated to JINI, the technology behind JavaSpaces
• Getting Started With JavaSpaces Technology: Beyond Conventional Distributed Programming Paradigms

First ow all: I highly recommend attending live Owens presentation if you will have a chance. It well worth the time. Few things more I would like to know about Jini in the long running high availability systems: Does somebody know materials which would explain how to deal with evolution of versions in the long running systems which utilize persistent spaces holding about 1 TB of data? Data versioning? Services versioning? I think this years JavaOne session BOF-0579 "Version-Aware SOA Using Jini and Java" was about it. Any materials online?

I think this years JavaOne session BOF-0579 "Version-Aware SOA Using Jini and Java" was about it. Any materials online?

You are in luck. Since this was a BOF, we didn't officially submit slides and I have a few versions of a presentation on Jini and versioning available on my website: http://brian.pontarelli.com/jini-stuff/

Thanks Brian! Are any code samples available?

Java: a system language. If we reverse engineer systems so they pretend to be objects... Then we will have an OO system? YAY! Noone needs this stuff to scale or do anything in particular. But by all means lets mangle the language some more so it looks like system internals. That way we will be forever captivated by the maze of our own creation and our conveniently self-engineered lack of an escape hatch.