A new version of the Jini Technology (define) Starter Kit is now generally available for download, officials at Sun Microsystems announced Wednesday.

The Jini Starter Kit 2.1 is an incremental update to the collection of Sun-created implementations, helper classes and other services used to help developers create Jini-powered applications.

One of the improvements to the starter kit is an implementation that supports many-to-many communications and batch (define) operations using a JavaSpaces (define) service.

Also included are: a starter kit installer; support for Ant to build binaries (define) and documentation from the source code; security and patching enhancements; PreferredListGen and EnvCheck tools; and class (define) improvements in ConfigurationFile and JoinManager.

Jini is Sun's answer to a dynamic distributed computing movement that's generating a lot of buzz these days, as well as a host of terms, with software vendors.

IBM calls it e-business On-Demand, Microsoft the Dynamic Systems Initiative while Hewlett-Packard has adopted the Adaptive Enterprise.

Sun has been working on Jini for a number of years, first announcing the technology years before the others in January 1999.

With Jini, Sun officials touted, devices added to a network would announce themselves and subsequently make themselves available to everyone on the network. But the company failed to gain any followers at the time, forcing Sun to re-market its software as an enterprise function.

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Now the technology is used as the platform for creating applications in grid computing, edge networks, enterprise integration and e-business. According to Sun officials, Jini has been adopted by a number of organizations, including the Chicago Stock Exchange and Orbitz.

The last version of the Jini Starter Kit, version 2.0.2 was in June and featured a license conversion from the Sun Community Source License (SCSL) to the Apache License v2 as well as some bug fixes.

Jini Starter Kit 2.1 can be downloaded here.