JINI and other Lookup Technologies
Jini software is an infrastructure that runs on top of a Java platform to create a federation of virtual machines
The lookup service in Jini is very powerful: it uses the Java platform type system as the namespace. This means that is stores not fixed name-value pairs, but objects and objects graphs (the actual behavior of an object)
You can search for an object or service based on a desired behavior, not just on its name; after finding it you immediately know how to use it
SLP - Service Location Protocol, mechanism for dynamically finding services on the network (lack of code mobility as in Jini)
IMS - Information Management Service, similar to Jini but limited to searching by name-value pairs only