Jonathan: an Open Distributed Objects Platform

Jonathan logo

Current releases: 2.0.5 and 3.0 alpha 10.

Jonathan is a Distributed Object Platform (DOP) written entirely in Java. Jonathan was developed originally at the research labs of France Télécom in the context of the European project ReTINA, whose aim was to define an architecture for telecommunications distributed environments. Telecommunications applications such as multimedia services have stringent requirements in terms of scalability, adaptability and realtime. Jonathan's response to this is through its "openness" in the sense that contrary to standard DOPs (and in particular, most CORBA ORBs), the abstractions that make up its internal machinery are accessible by an application programmer and may be specialized to meet specific requirements.

Jonathan is organised around a very small kernel (namely Kilim that essentially lets the infrastructure components communicate. Currently, these components consist of a number of independently developed protocols, marshallers, stub factories, etc.

Different personalities can be built using these components. A personality is a set of normalized Application Programming Interfaces: Java RMI is a personality, CORBA is another, COM still another... Jonathan provides two personnalities:

David is a CORBA ORB implementation. David lacks a number of CORBA features (POA, interface repository, Dynamic Any,...) and provides only a naive naming service implementation. However, our ambition is to fill these gaps and to provide a reference CORBA implementation.
Jeremie provides an RMI-like programming style.

Recent News

25th October 2002: Jonathan 3.0 alpha 10 release

A new alpha release of Jonathan 3.0 is available for download. Changes are:

Kernel.kcf configuration file has been modified. It is now more understandable, structured and more compliant with the best practices associated with Kilim.
Jonathan now integrates JacORB's POA

23th October 2002: Jonathan 3.0 alpha 9 release

A new alpha release of Jonathan 3.0 is available for download. See the history for changes.

9th August 2002: Kilim website launched

Kilim now has its own website (independant from Jonathan's). Find it at http://kilim.objectweb.org/.

8th August 2002: Kilim 1.1.1 is released

Corresponding to the move to Sourceforge, a new Kilim has been tagged on CVS: Kilim 1.1.1, tag Kilim_1_1_1. It is in practice very little different from Kilim 1.1 (mainly, the XML2Kernel tool, used to create bootstrap kernels, is now called Kcf2Java). Enjoy.

6th August 2002: Kilim moved to Sourceforge

The Kilim configuration framework has now found a new home on the debian-sf system at Objectweb: http://forge.objectweb.org/projects/kilim. All CVS access should be done from there.

25th July 2002: Kheops renamed to Kilim

For intellectual property reasons the Kheops configuration framework has been renamed to Kilim.

19th July 2002: Jonathan 3.0 alpha 8 release

A new alpha release of Jonathan 3.0 is available for download. Main differences include usage of Kheops 1.1 rather than the built-in configuration framework, as well as a number of bug fixes.

6 June 2002: new Jonathan documentation available

Sacha Krakowiak (e-mail: sacha.krakowiak at inrialpes.fr) has written a Jonathan tutorial which presents the Jonathan frameworks in great details. Any contributions or corrections are welcome.