Imagine using your J2ME device to participate in a complicated online game
– or a simple one, for that matter. You log in to a network where network
services are elements of the game. You, as a player in a massive online
world, are represented as an object, a peer of all the other game elements.
Your player object becomes the client of a map service, a service that allows
you to explore and move around while delivering necessary display
information. Your object discovers and uses other services as needed, without
prior knowledge of many of them. You meet a creature you’ve never
encountered before – is it a computer-controlled character or another
player?
The criteria for finding game elements can actually be tied to real-time game
play. You may have access only to services with a notion of proximity to your
object; maybe the map service is really a group of services... (more)
In Part 1 of this article (JDJ, Vol. 7, issue 3) I introduced the idea of
using the surrogate architecture within Jini as a platform for J2ME games. I
also showed how to start Madison, Sun's reference implementation, and how to
connect to it with the provided device simulator.
This article continues the surrogate architecture tour and introduces a
method through which a J2ME device can use it.
To briefly recap, the architecture allows any device, in our case a J2ME one,
to connect to a Jini network through a surrogate object that represents the
device in the network. The surrogat... (more)
William Swaney, a software developer specializing in distributed computing, works for Valaran Corp., where he experiments with mobile devices and Jini networks. He divides his time between tweaking Valaran’s surrogate host implementation and kicking a soccer ball into a bucket.
David Lucas
Shaul Efraim
Terence Martin Breslin
Cory Marchand
David Hughes
James Carlini
John Iffert
Dan Stolts
Joe Zeto
