Industrial-Strength P2P

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.

I hope it changes my life as much as Jini did!

[JMZero]

Unless a new technology:

A: Means I can do something I currently cannot (and want to do)

or

B: Does something so much better as to make my old methods obsolete

it doesn't excite me much. I think sharing illegal files was the killer app of P2P.

Who pays for P2P?

[Artifice_Eternity]

This is what I don't understand. Unless it's either a paid-subscription model (pay to join) or a truly, totally distributed and open-source system (there are NO central servers of any kind), I'm not sure how P2P can make money.

Of course not all web sites have to make money. Once upon a time, pre-dot-com-boom, this was common knowledge. P2P networks run by dedicated enthusiasts may have the best chance of survival. Those are the kind of sites I've always liked best anyway...done for love, not money.

Does the Future Really Need Jxta?

[smittyoneeach]

I have a lot of respect for Joy's technical acumen. Perhaps someone else can do something deeper than this press release.
What is it, specifically, besides (insert file-sharing utility here) with enhanced security?
I recall the Wired article [wired.com] about Jini, but a 'Doze beater it was not. Should we expect anything different from this equally-cooled-named product?
Notwithstanding trading MP3 files and gaming, is anyone using peer-to-peer applications?

Re:Who pays for P2P?

[bourne]

The question isn't who pays, it is who benefits.

Think of P2P as a way of efficiently distributing data and/or processing. The key word here is efficiently. Consider DNS, a distributed database. DNS is the system that was designed to allow the Internet to scale up from modest beginnings, and it exceeded expectations (and continues to do so) for scalability. It's the glue that keeps the Internet going, and which works better than a lot of newer, application-layer protocols (HTTP - been slashdotted lately?)

Therefore, an efficient and easily usable P2P framework allows application builders to build things that work better and faster than is available today. This isn't the new car - it's the new road.

Once you get the road built, then you start figuring out how to make money off of it. No one makes money off of DNS, but there's money to be made of the Internet that it enables (pr0n if nothing else!)

How does the "web" make money?

[KarmaBlackballed]

The web makes no money. Some companies/people use the internet standards to make money, but the "web" itself does not. (For example, www.slashdot.com makes some money on the web through advertising.)

How will p2p make money? It will not. Some companies/people might figure out a way to leverage it though.

Re:Who pays for P2P?

[lucas_gonze]

That's a way of thinking that's really about filesharing applications, which were just the launching point for P2P. In the long run P2P is a bag of techniques (like location independent naming) that are being absorbed into the web. Asking who pays for those techniques is like asking who pays for tuplespaces -- the people that pay for P2P are the employers of the programmers who use P2P techniques to solve business problems.

Whither SOAP?

[JMZero]

JXTA - means of identifying and communicating with objects. Uses HTTP and XML. Brought to you by Sun. P2P! P2P!

SOAP/UDDI - means of identifying and communicating with objects. Uses HTTP and XML. Widely deployed standard. Use for anything you'd like.

Who makes money with the telephone?

[vscjoe]

Gosh, all these people talking to each other, and no central servers of any kind (except for a few 900 numbers). How does anybody make money?

Actually, the fact that your mindset became widespread is probably one of the worst things that happened to the web and Internet. It used to be mostly P2P until VCs and other companies started hijacking previously decentralized services and putting them on big, inefficient, hard-to-maintain, vulnerable central servers.

P2P represents a return to the roots of the web and Internet. If you want to chat with someone or exchange information with other people, you put it on a machine you control. Hopefully, ISPs and web hosting servicese will improve the quality of their product in response to increased demand. Improved services means both better outgoing bandwidth, better usage metering, and better naming services (so that people can find you).

Oh, in case you still don't get it, the people who make money with P2P is the ISPs, software, and hardware makers.

The trouble with JXTA

[Sanity]

Adam Langley, a Freenet [freenetproject.org] developer, wrote an interesting article for OpenP2P.com on Jxta a few months back which, from reading the article, still seems to hold true today - read it here [openp2p.com].

Essentially the problem with Jxta is that it is built on the assumption that P2P needs a communication standard above the TCP/IP level, and I am unconvinced that it does. The range of applications that call themselves P2P are sufficiently diverse that they each have different (and often mutually-exclusive) requirements of the communication layer that sits above TCP/IP, yet this is exactly the layer that JXTA tries to mandate.

As an example, Freenet has very strict requirements about how encryption is implemented at a low level, most other P2P architectures have no such requirement (and, in fact, would fail if such a requirement was forced upon them). Freenet, Fastrack, Mojo Nation and other systems also have very different ideas about how peer discovery is achieved, yet again, JXTA tries to mandate this too (adopting a Gnutella-inspired approach).

Standards are useful in some circumstances, but for P2P, TCP/IP is probably the highest-level standard we need.