What is the difference between Jini and RMI?

Question

I'm new in Jini technology. I understand it is used for distributed computing or "network plug and play". But I don't understand the difference between pure RMI and Jini. Also, I want to understand when Jini is used.

Answer 1

As indicated in the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jini):

Clients can use the lookup service to retrieve a proxy object to the service; calls to the proxy translate the call to a service request, performs this request on the service, and returns the result to the client. This strategy is more convenient than Java remote method invocation, which requires the client to know the location of the remote service in advance.

So basically RMI is a mechanism to perform Java calls between a client and a server that know each other. Jini adds services to lookup services from the clients, so the clients do not need to know where the servers are located beforehand.