What is this Jini technology?

Question

This question is about the Jini technology. In Head First Java book, the authors say they expect their readers to get experienced in Jini, when the time is correct. However, few months ago, I found out this Jini is now Apache River. I really wanted to learn it because I have heard it is capable of doing cool stuff like controlling your TV, your fan, oven etc from your computer. Now, following are my questions

1. From where can I learn this technology from the beginning? (Please don't give the following link http://river.apache.org/user-guide-basic-river-services.html because it has no help for a beginner with this technology)

2. Do I need electronic engineering knowledge to work with it? (If yes, either I have to give up or find a guy with that knowledge)

3. Do I need cost full devices to work with it? (Lile antennas, remote controllers)

4. Why there are no books about it? (I have seen 2 Java Robotic books after a huge search. Unfortunately they are older than 10 years)

Answer 1

I would say there is an element of confusion here. There is no direct connection between Jini and robotics or controlling your TV than any other java technology, jini is a distributed object service which lets services communicate and find other services. You could use it to control things if you wanted to, if your services provided those details, and maybe there is the confusion because i think lego mindstorms does, but it is no more dedicated to robotics than anything else is.

Probably worth reading the wikipedia description for it