Jini/Rio training — Day 2
The second day of the training was much better than the first day. Trainees were able to adapt the first example I explained them yesterday (simple Echo Jini service).
I asked them to write a Add service, adding two integers. They had to write the whole thing: a smart proxy (simply dumping log statements and calling the remote backend), the implementation of the service, a server registering the proxy in the lookup service and servicing client calls, and of course a client looking up the service and using it. Based on what I did for the Echo service, they were able to replicate most of the stuff and adapt it for their service.
During the second day of the training, I had enough time to show them how to write the same service using Rio facilities instead of Jini core infrastructure. The nice thing about this is that they were able to understand how Rio simplified code and what it gave them for free (provisioning and such). I took this opportunity to explain them the OpStrings (Rio deployment descriptors) and show them the various tools packaged in Rio.
The second day finished with an exercice based on my second example: they had to rewrite their Add service with Rio instead of “bare” Jini.
Note: whenever you’ll have to do some kind of training, do not forget that you’ll probably have to make the students work in isolation from each other when developing, while when demonstrating you’ll want them to be in the “same cluster”. Switching between the two proved to be a bit painful.
Here are some pictures from Day 2 (click on the pictures for higher resolution):
