Reviews : Java MetaData Interface (JMI) :

MOF Reflection:

Similar to the Java Reflection API the JMI specification provides a mechanism to discover objects at runtime. For this purpose JMI provides MOF reflective interfaces to create, modify and invoke operations on class proxy objects. It also allows navigating the MOF package structure and allows to query and update links using association objects.

Conclusion:

The JMI Specification provides a Java version of the MOF. The specification is led by Unisys and is backed by major industry players Sun, IBM, Oracle, and Sybase, who are part of the Expert group for this specification. The specification is in the final stage after it was approved by the expert group and is available for download from the Java Community Process site http://www.jcp .org/en/jsr/detail?id=40. JMI provides mappings for MOF 1.4 and is compatible with J2SE 1.3. Some existing specifications are already banking on JMI or are using the JMI technology. The JSR 69 Java API for OLAP, which defines a Java API for OLAP objects, uses JMI to generate interfaces. The Java Data Mining API discussed in a previous article on JavaBoutique uses JMI to generate the data mining APIs. Sun’s netBeans already implements the JMI specification in its Metadata Repository Project. SAP NetWeaver has a Metamodel Repository (MMR) which has a JMI implementation.

As the need for integrating systems increase, the demand for common, unified modeling mechanisms like JMI and MOF will increase. Data extraction tools might solve the data integration problems today, but as the data volume increases and systems become more complicated metadata models might be the only way to integrate systems

Benoy Jose is a web developer with over six years of experience in J2EE and Microsoft technologies. He is a Sun Certified programmer and enjoys writing technical and non-technical articles for various magazines.

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