The tale of jCIFS is a Romeo and Juliet story: two technologies find each other on the Internet and come together despite a feud between their parents. Only this time, there’s a happy ending.
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The tale of jCIFS is a Romeo and Juliet story: two technologies find each other on the Internet and come together despite a feud between their parents. Only this time, there’s a happy ending.
Tuesday, February 1st, 2005
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jCIFS (http://jcifs.samba.org/) is the product of an unlikely union between Sun’s Java and Microsoft’s SMB/CIFS file sharing suite. jCIFS provides all of the tools a Java coder needs to get along in a Windows Network Neighborhood; jCIFS dances elegantly with Samba; and jCIFS runs on everything from palmtops to mainframes. Where else but in open source could such a story be told?
Romance, drama, intrigue, pathos, and protocols. Shakespeare, move over.
SMB is the Server Message Block protocol. It was created at IBM back in the mid-’80s as a way of letting DOS personal computers share files with one another. In the early days, IBM collaborated with Microsoft and a few other companies on the development of SMB, which became a standard part of both OS/2 and Microsoft Windows. Since then, several third-party implementations were also written, and today the best-known of those is Samba, an open source SMB server suite first introduced in 1992.
Microsoft eventually took over control of SMB development, and, in the mid-’90s, they gave it a “marketing upgrade.” Microsoft renamed it the Common Internet File System, or CIFS, gussied it up a little, and trotted it out as a worthy competitor to Sun’s WebNFS.
The nineties were the heady days of the Internet, when establishing a new protocol as a de facto standard was seen as equivalent to staking a claim on a gold mine. Sun had already proposed WebNFS (basically a web-enabled version of NFS) as…
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