Jini and .NET are the two most popular distributed computing environments nowadays. Jini architecture provides an infrastructure for defining, advertising, and finding services in a network, while .NET lets developers build Internet-based, distributed applications using .NET Remoting. These two environments are very similar in many aspects and both are capable of facilitating implementation of distributed programs. However, they are not compatible. Clients in Jini can not request remote services from .NET systems and clients in .NET can not find Jini services. Furthermore, none of these environments provides load-balancing mechanisms. To solve these two problems, this paper integrates Jini and .NET and proposes a smart proxy architecture. Consequently, Jini and .NET services can now make themselves visible to both Jini and .NET clients, and any Jini or .NET client can transparently switch to a less-loaded Jini or .NET service through a smart proxy once the current service is too busy. Specifically, this paper solves two important issues for Jini and .NET: interoperability and dynamic load-balancing. Experimental results show that this technique can dynamically distribute Jini and .NET clients quite evenly over Jini and .NET services when proper load-balancing strategies are implemented onto smart proxies.
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