Interoperable P2P: Jxta

Troy writes: "This article went up today (on developerWorks) about the Open Source project called Jxta, which is a community-run attempt to build a utility application substrate for peer-to-peer applications. Anything with an electronic heartbeat can become a Jxta peer." A nice high-level overview of how Jxta is supposed to work.

Comments

Re:Jxta is not all that

[trix_e]

That's not neccesarily the case... true that things are a bit vague at this point, but what P2P frameworks are all about is providing some basic level of services to build upon.

Keys being that most P2P apps need some of the same basic things. in my simplistic terms:
Authentication, Security & Trust, a Capacity for dealing with a changing and non-stable network, some sort of common messaging format, etc. There's more, but I'm tired of typing.

if Jxta can provide these types of services in a useable way, then it can be very powerful...

anyway... a can of soup can be very powerful too if used properly... it all comes in the implementation. but that's my .02c

Re:Jxta vs. Freenet

[Hobbex]

They are not comparable. With Freenet, we are trying to achieve a very specific task - publishing data and making it available in a manner that disassociates with any physical location. The Freenet protocol works for this task, and this task only - it would not be possible to implement anything like jxta over Freenet, and nor would it be (regardless of what people who do not understand the technology may say) possible to implement Freenet, or anything like it, within jxta.
From what I understand, and while I'll disclaim that I could be wrong I did read through the specifications, jxta is basically a generalized Gnutella. To begin with, the idea seems nice enough: Why is Gnutella limited to searching for string matches, wouldn't it be nicer if messages could carry arbitrary queries so that one could use the same network to ask for "Porn jpgs matching \BIG BOOBIES\" and "2 billion computer cycles to render BIG_BOOBIES.3ds"?

Yes, it would be nicer, but then, the limitation of searches is not really Gnutella biggest problem , is it? Gnutella's biggest problem is scalability and performance, and - this is what people don't seem to want to hear - by generalizing the queries completely, you have closed the door on trying to make this any better (for searching to work without broadcast you need either sorting or (centralized) indexing - arbitrary queries are neither sortable nor indexable). And for that reason you cannot implement and network like Freenet, or Oceanstore, or Chord, or anything that even attempts to optimize routing beyond the everybody-screams-at-the-top-of-their-voice approach, on top of Jxta.

The interoperability bug that has caught certain people in regards to the group of programs called "P2" is misguided. It is like "standards" and "interoperability" has become such a holy cow in many circles that people will simply not hear the physical arguments for why interoperable fire and water simply isn't a very good idea for either.Not that it really matters - all the people I have met who are actually doing anything worthwhile in this are seem to understand this very well.

Re:Java, JINI, JXTA...

[jeffy124]

I beg to differ on some of your comments. Jini is a means of building ad-hoc networks for devices and services, while Jxta could be built on top of Jini to build a quick network of shared resources. Jini originally started out as a wireless or other device thing, but has found uses in software. J2EE is not really related to Jini/Jxta, but it can build itself off of the services they provide. J2EE is intended for large-scale enterprise applications like databases, and it's possible to do that using traditional methods or utilizing ideas offered by Jxta and/or Jini.

However, I do agree with that this is a way of attacking and going after the wireless market. Sun needs a marketing dept like that of MS, one that is aggressive and sees oppurtunity in tying things together. Let's just hope that un doesn't go too far with that ; )