Industrial-Strength P2P 104
hhutkin writes "Business 2.0 has an article in their latest issue on Bill Joy and Sun's peer-to-peer play, Jxta." A bit light on details but still good to know progress is being made in the field of peer to peer apps. But don't expect anything useful any time soon.
Better Info Source... (Score:3, Informative)
They provide considerably more details, to wit:
The Project JXTA platform initially defines the following protocols:
This kind of corresponds to some of the traditional Unix services like Bind, and such, or with CORBA services like Naming, Trading, and such, albeit with the explicit intent that the respective "registries" of hosts and host information be Rather Dynamic.
This seems a lot more likely to "go somewhere" than Jini, seeing as how it's a lot more "platform-independent." See the Protocol Specs [jxta.org]
Groove Networks' comment.. (Score:2, Informative)
Industrial-strength (Score:1, Informative)
One of the things it's got going for it are the basics, if you read the material [jxta.org] on it, you will see it has taken the spirit of UNIX pipes and shells and extended it to P2P. This is a very powerfull Philosophy being applied to a modern concept, and I think it hols a little water. Having spent a lot of time disseminating various P2P technologies, I think this and jabber [jabber.org] have a good basic ideas, a fusion of both would be even better
Many uses for P2P (Score:3, Informative)
1. The WWW itself is purely P2P. links form the backbone of the P2P network. Search engines make the spidering more efficient, but they are really just cached spidering. At the base level, to get around, you spider just as in Gnutella.
2. Samba is P2P.
3. CUPS is P2P, letting you share your printers.
4. NFS is P2P when you connect to and start using enough servers (although when you do this, let the hacking begin...)
Here is what *could* be done with it:
1. I'm currently heading a project to share genealogical information. Post your GEDCOM to your computer's P2P app, and it is automatically spiderable on the network. For those interested, its still at alpha/beta stage and at gntp.sourceforge.net.
2. Wouldn't a world wide library application be wonderful? Input your book or article, and all of the libraries worlwide that have your book show up. No, I'm not talking about the textual WWW. I'm talking about a strongly-data-typed library network.
3. What about a P2P e-business network. Again, it could be strongly-typed and object oriented. Much more powerful than WWW. I developed one of these and I'm publishing a paper on it right now. It would make today's registries and marketplaces useless. Allow anyone on, user-customizable categorization scheme, etc. This one would take a big player like MS or IBM to really implement, though, because you need lots of people on it all at once to make it useful.
My point is that there are many, many uses for P2P. People just need to open their minds to what has already been done and what could be done. File sharing is great, but it is only the beginning of the types of networks we could build.