Anne Thomas Manes wrote: > > > On 1/14/07, Steve Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > <mailto:jones.steveg%40gmail.com>> wrote: > > > > What would you describe as the "objects" in a military scenario who > > state determines the next step? I'd have a similar questions in other > > scenarios (e.g. American Footbal coaching with its fixed plays called > > from the side lines). > > A battle plan is fabulous right up until the start of battle. Then it > must adapt to the current state of the battle -- the actual deployment > of enemy troops, the weapons in use, the weather, civilians, > casualities, etc. > > As Gervas said, the Army is not truly centralized. Officers in the > field must constantly make their own decisions. They are goal-driven > rather than execution-driven. "Take that hill." "Secure that > building." "Destroy that bunker."
In fact, there was a lot of military use of Jini, early on because of the ability to dynamically discover services as well as see the services disappear because access to those services could be leased. There are still members of the Jini community active in the military products business that tell me they are still using Jini. They aren't, for probably obvious reasons, very talkative about the specifics of their use of Jini. As a simple overview of what was going on 6 years ago with Jini in the Military, they had computer systems that were marked as "ordinance tracking" or "battlefield control" or "battlefield mapping" and such. These computer systems were distributed in multiplicity into battle groups. They were all up and running, but through discovery and some voting or other decision processes, only one was in control but the others were kept in sync. If a group had to pack up and move, they could sumarily turn things off (to avoid RF based signature tracking) and "run". The system would adapt through leasing expiration and elect new controlling systems and continue functioning. These types of facilities are what make fault tolerant, distributed systems humm. Web services or REST doesn't add any direct value here. It's all the logic and service functionality that matters. Everything in WS-* and REST would mostly just be about data wrapping (military needs encrypted data paths through secured and varied transport systems) and wire protocols. Those things are just such a small part of the total functionality needed... Gregg Wonderly
