Here is a really old issue (Sep. 2003) of the JDJ magazine made available as a PDF, which you can download from their
official site.
7 years later, still most of the articles in that magazine reads relevant except for my lame article on Jini and MBeans that sounds very primitive now. But that said, building a self-healing, services-based distributed system is still an acceptable topic to debate on-to Jini or not!
You can follow the developments of Jini through the
Apache River project.