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Interoperable P2P: Jxta

Posted by michael on from the you-got-your-napster-in-my-gnutella dept.

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.

5 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Java, JINI, JXTA... by MosesJones · · Score: 5, Interesting


    Sun are a strange bunch, a company where the vi v emacs wars can really kick off as two of the developers are there (Gosling for emacs, Joy for vi). JXTA is another of Bill Joy's babies, its meant to be a language/protocol independent offering for peer to peer solutions, which was originially what http://www.jini.org said they would do (Jim Waldo).

    JXTA is a nice idea, and there are some good papers from JavaOne on the subject. But given that Sun's marketing might is behind J2EE will JXTA really be given a chance ?

    IMO the answer is probably yes, JXTA and Java are part of a two pronged attack at next generation devices, this isn't really PC to PC type applications but device to device, most of the next generation mobiles will be running Java, some will not and most service provider cells will not, JXTA enables the bridge between the Java world of the device and the big bad world of networking to interact.

    Strange how the best ideas come without marketing strategies. Java was an inhouse project which aimed for 10,000 downloads. Will the same explosion happen with JXTA in a wireless world ?

    PCs suck, time to distribute.

    --
    An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
    1. Re:Java, JINI, JXTA... by jeffy124 · · Score: 4, Informative
      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 ; )

      --
      The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
  2. Intelligently routing generalised queries by Sanity · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Agreed, agreed, agreed. One minor quibble though:
    for searching to work without broadcast you need either sorting or (centralized) indexing - arbitrary queries are neither sortable nor indexable
    I don't think this is nescessarily true. The minimum requirement for being about to do a Freenet-style best-first search for something is that you can define an equality operator, and a closeness operator (ie. "A is closer to B than C is").

    The closeness operator sounds a bit like sorting, and anything that can be sorted can also have a closeness operator, however not everything that can have a closeness operator can be sorted. There is no reason why a more general query couldn't conform to these requirements. Generally speaking it would probably require some form of "fuzzy matching" of metadata to an SQL-style query. Of course this would require some constraints on the nature of the query, but it could still be much more flexible than Freenet's current lexographic search.

  3. I have figured it out... by Hobbex · · Score: 4, Funny


    For those who don't get what Jxta is good for, don't worry, it took me a while too, but I think I have it.

    Jxta is an attempt to combine XML, Java, and Gnutella. Obviously, this unholy hybrid can have only one purpose - to make a computer program so slow time runs backwards!

  4. Jxta is not all that by hardburn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Jxta was created by Sun to be a "framework" for P2P networks. What exactly that means is rather vague. It appears to make basic development decisions that are better left up to indiviual projects (such as broadcast seaches). TCP/IP is really the only thing most P2P networks have in common, and even that could often be easily replaced with a diffrent underlieing protocol if it was necessary.

    There are several other assumptions that Jxta makes that it shouldn't. See this article for more information.

    --
    Not a typewriter