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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.
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.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
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.
www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~sager
While I thought it was a good article - and I can't tell you how much I like the thin format they have now - remember lugging those 2 inch thick ones back in the .com heydays - one must ask oneself how viable any private non-Open Source P2P system will be.
After people have enough judges messing in the sphere, the user base decides to just go it alone with P2P open source systems that have no centralized server - mostly as they don't like having the plug pulled on them.
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--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Considering what a lead zepplin that Jini was, im not going to fall over myself in excitement for this new system.
I remember when SOAP was going to be the protocol that was going to bridge the remote method invocation gap across platforms. The .NET version of SOAP turned out to be just different enough from the standard to still nominally conform to the standard but still make it difficult to adapt to it from Apache SOAP or another implementation.
.NET.
Wondering how (or indeed, if) JXTA will be implemented into
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
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Because the article says nothing.
Typical business publication
Sun has definately is omnious in its presence on unix market, but their contributions to unix communities, while cool for programmers - were not for sysadmin. RPC, NFS and NIS(+) were some the most exploted system blocks, running right behind bind and sendmail. Going to next point, does industrial strength means free gateways for hackers scanning cable and xDSL address ranges?
2c
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 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?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I wonder how this will compare to openFT, which is made by the people who made giFT, the first and only open sourced implementation of the protocol that KaZaA and Morpheus use, and the person who made Gnapster, Jasta, which was one of the first napster clones.
This stuff could become useful, in a business setting, for instance, by allowing employees to wander around with laptops with wireless network hardware, and have a self-assembling network. Within that sort of setting, the notion of "paid subscription" is ridiculous silliness. Money wouldn't be "made;" money would be saved over alternative ways of setting up networks.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
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Copyright © 2002 me
Nobody's replying to this because all this article is doing is talking about some guy developing a P2P protocol.
... with this new protocol... a computer chip in my shoe can function as a "peer", but what the heck does that prove how robust this new protocol is going to be?
Gee whiz.... big news...
It's no different than making any other new protocol... the hard part is getting everyone to use it. And even though this article is titled "industrial strength", it doesn't elaborate on what makes this new protocol so "industrially strong". Does it use encryption? Respect copyrighted material? In bed with the RIAA? Who knows.... because this author certainly doesn't.
Yeah... sure
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.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
I'm not sure how P2P can make money.
Since when does everything need to make someone lots of money?
In a true peer-to-peer system, the costs would be transparently distributed among the users in the form of their internet-connectivity bills. Since they are paying for those anyway, it wouldn't even be noticeable.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I am glad to hear some thing new out of the P2P industry even if it is so light on details.
THere are so many things that P2P seems like it would work great for so many things other then file exchange.
what uses does any one see for future use of P2P.
One use that I though of that could be cool it paying people to be part of a large scale cache of the net.. Well used web sites could make dynamicly mirror them selves very similar to the way Kazza and MORPHEUS Network share files.
What other uses do people see for P2P in the future?
Lets have fun!!
True, it wasn't always reliable but by and large it worked, it was free, and it was largely unencumbered by the great unwashed masses that polute the internet these days...
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
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.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
How does JXTA, or
Ever heard of samba? Windows file/print sharing?
Yep it's P2P
Yep it's useful
Thank you, and good night.
Apathy -- The state of numbness of the mind. When you are apathic, you can think.
1. JXTA was written by a bunch of inexperienced Java developers. They broke all the rules of Java programming and wrote spagetti code. I think they discovered Design Patterns in the middle of their project and overused and abused them, yielding worse code.
2. They wrote demonstrations that used the pipe and filter architecture pattern to construct a unix shell essentially. One could list the peers on the network, pipe it through more, and wow your boss. But wait, it doesn't stop there - they created a chat program -- oooh.. IRC, IM anyone? When the time came to implement a real application, it was near impossible
3. The firewall/double firewall tunneling didn't work, so LAN deployment only folks!
4. The RVs, where peers gather and discover one another, were designed to only handle 10 socket connections, 4 of which were persistent. Nice and scalable! No failover support for the 1st release, BTW :)
5. There were a lot of holes in the specification and thus ports to other languages will yield them potentially incompatible above the basic network protocol(which is XML, BTW, and thus slow as binary exchange of files need to be BASE64 encoded)
6. The entire JXTA project is tagged as a research and development project only. This means that unlike Jini, which obtained a large marketing and development budget, Sun is throwing a lot of cheap developers and little marketing to this project.
In the end, it didn't deliver what it promised, it wasn't built for production use (Jini at least was, to some degree thank you Mr. Joy), and missed a lot of concepts necessary for effective peer networking.
Where are they now? Not sure.. We quit looking at their code around July and concentrated on other network alternatives - settling on Jabber.
What a disappointment!
Ever heard of samba? Windows file/print sharing?
Yep it's P2P
Yep it's useful
Thank you, and good night.
Apathy -- The state of numbness of the mind. When you are apathic, you can think.
Napster = P2P
Napster = cool
Napster = sued
Napster = shut down
Gnutella = True P2P
Gnutella = slow
Gnutella = bandwidth-hogging
Gnutella = unsure future
JXTA = P2P Protocols
JXTA = has some developers
JXTA = coming from a company with a shaky past in "revolutionary new technologies"
JXTA = something that not many people understand
JXTA = not being marketed heavily by Sun.
The general public and some geeks equate "P2P" with "illegal music sharing". To make matters worse, Bill Joy has failed to put this invention into terms that non-computer-literates can understand.
I'm keeping an ear to the ground for cool new projects involving JXTA. However, I fear that like JINI before it, it will be relegated to obscurity because of a failure of marketing and a lack on understanding of how it will benefit consumers.
The #1 sales trick is "Explain benefits, not features." Consumers don't care if it provides "ground rules for P2P applications." They want to know what benefits it provides to them. So far, I've seen much discussion on JXTA's technical merits, but absolute zero discussion on what kind of cool applications are going to use it. Where is the "JXTA-enabled" widget that will "change your life"?
Wrong title, but good technology
One of the things it's got going for it are the basics, if you read the material 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 have a good basic ideas, a fusion of both would be even better
Basically, a mainframe/thin client implemented virtually on a peer network. The advantages as I see them would be keeping the centralized aspect of a mainframe (at least as far as software goes) and easy scalability of a peer network (just add workstations for more storage and processors).
I'm not sure that the advantages would outweigh the costs in terms of physical network requirements, or even if the advantages are real or just imagined, but I thought it was an interesting idea I could maybe throw out there for someone who actually knows enough to maybe pull it off.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
- Does it allow for variable connectivity and temporary network addresses?
- Does it give nodes at the edges of the network significant autonomy?
I don't think Sun is funding this on the idea that there will be instant monetary benefits from Jxta, but I do think Sun is looking to implement features of P2P in to their own product line sometime in the future. Even if they don't incorporate any P2P features in future projects, what they are trying to do is get a head start over Microsoft for the "Next Big Thing." Is P2P going to be the "Next Big Thing?" Well, that is obviously debatable but one only needs to look at the top ten applications on Download.com to see that at least the file sharing and IM P2P applications are incredibly popular.What is it, specifically, besides (insert file-sharing utility here) with enhanced security?
That's a very poor way of characterizing it. What JXTA is (or attempts to be) is a platform upon which you can easily develop and deploy a p2p app-- without all that messy reinventing the wheel that would otherwise be required. File sharing apps are certainly one application you could develop, but you can also build distributed computing/streaming/chat utilities. And anything else you can imagine.
So the concept is great. Unfortunately, JXTA doesn't seem to be quite there yet. JXTA currently only provides a working implementation of the lower-level components required to put together a p2p app. Peer discovery isn't very sophisticated at this point, though the basic tools with which you might build a more sophisticated system are there. And performance isn't great.
This is only my opinion, but the problem I see is that JXTA seems to be more of a research project than an attempt to build a practical p2p platform. Maybe in time JXTA will be refined into a more practical tool, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was displaced by a better performing, less flexible platform (based off of Kazaa/Morpheus, maybe.)
Today Sun Microsystems announced Jeinfeld, a new technology about nothing. "Jeinfeld is a major breakthrough" says Bill Joy, chief scientist at Sun. "By eliminating any functionality whatsoever, Jeinfeld brings the platform-independent dream of Java, Jini, and Jxta fully to fruition."
Sun Microsystems "The White Paper is the Product"
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.
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.
I can't believe P2P gets such a rap from this crowd. There are *lots* of things you can do with it besides file sharing or MP3 thieving. First, let's take a look at what has already been done with it (although it wasn't called P2P at the time):
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.
Jini - what the fuck is it?
Java - compile once, run anywhere MY ASS!
NFS - oh fucking brilliant! can you say bug-of-the-month-club and slower than windows 98 on a 486
Solaris - ever try porting something(of reasonable size) to it? maximum breakage! compatibility MY ASS!
At least Microsoft can deliver some of it's promises...let's see win95...winXP...ie4...even if it always takes them a little longer
Ah, Slashdot, where there are two categories for everything - Microsoft and NOT Microsoft
Slashdot, the site where everything's made up and the points don't matter
there is two question here.
1/ can you pay get paid through a P2P platform
2/ What do you sell/buy through a P2P platform
I have no answer for the second question but IMHO, JXTA is the only P2P platform whith an (planned) anonymous payment system inside, where each peer can act as a merchant (getting paid) AND as a consumer (able to pay securely)...
Who is able to answer to the second question ?
Hmm. I can see some big shoe manufacturers buying into this. Your shoes gathering data like how much you wear them, how many G's they take while you walk, how the tread pattern is holding up. At night when you're sleeping, the shoes jack in and Big Shoe Company trolls the P2P network looking for data. Pretty soon, every shoe company is putting larger and larger chips into their shoes, sending up more and more data. Incredible bandwidth is sucked up by shoe data, and advertisers join in on the game. All too soon, it is unprofitable to do anything but shoe related networking. The process reaches the "Shoe Event Horizon", after which civilization collapses, and those with the right genetic makeup mutate into large vulture like birds... (my apologies to Mr. Adams).
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Good analysis.
Think Akamai with peered nodes and intelligent network mapping.
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
Intel (Where I used to work at)They had an internal P2P app they were just rolling out over the last few months called Share and Learn Software. It was a lame little P2P client that would allow Andy Grove and the crew to speak to us on our standard Windows 2000 build workstations without clogging up the hopeless WAN links with multicast or whatever. I had the app installed on my laptop, but never did get a chance to see it in action. If I recall correctly, they made some case that during the roll-out of one of the company wide speeches that the P2P package saved the day by successfully allowing folks at the Israel site to get a copy of the video where traditional means had failed.
At any rate, if a somewhat conservative outfit like Intel corp could manage to half-ass deploy a useful and assumedly working P2P app, you'd think others would have by now also.
The WWW itself is purely P2P.
NO! HTTP is classic master-slave. A master - your web browser, barking at some random port between 1025 and 65535 - orders a slave - the web server, listening at the fixed port 80 - to send it a web page.
[Truth be told, true peer to peer computing is very nearly impossible, if not provably so. Everything in computer science eventually degrades to master-slave.]
I think that Jini was fine. As is Jxta, I'm sure (though I've only briefly looked at the thing). The problem is Sun.
They come down off the mountain with these standards like they were revelations. I think this puts a lot of people on the defensive. No matter how open the standard is, Sun wants to keep reminding us that it was their idea.
In part it's also a chicken and egg problem. JXTA will have more value as it becomes a standard, but until then it has only marginal benefits over whatever proprietary system people use (and thus its adoption is slow).
I think people should concentrate on SOAP. There's no reason P2P couldn't be implemented this way instead.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I wish that moderators would also leave replies to comments. I don't particularly disagree with the idea that my post here is a Troll (as I'm an idiot and prone to say stupid things).
But I'd like to know if the moderator has some sort of insight here.
And yes, I can stand to lose some Karma...
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Ray Ozzie, the inventor of Lotus Notes is the head of the Groove P2P product mentioned in the article. And it's a very interesting product at that (try it!).
I seriously doubt that this is anything more than a very casual marketing thing... Please don't use Ray Ozzie's creations in the same context as the Evil Empire, it pains me physically !!!
Thanks.
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
You're right, file sharing is still a killer app. But it's no longer one that Sun can exploit to sell Jxta.
Though I'm sure the RIAA would love to see it try.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
It's a bad sign when you have to tell people how to pronounce the cutesy name of your technology. I look at Jxta and hear "Jicksta", or maybe "Jecksta".
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
I did consider saying IP rather than TCP/IP since I do think that UDP/IP is likely to become more popular with P2P apps, but since today most P2P apps use TCP I stuck with that. As you say, this is orthogonal to my main point.
Millions of people may have used Napster, but what percentage of them were solely consumers of other people's files? How many gave as many uploads as they took downloads?
Can you be a first class P2P participant if:
My serious problem with JXTA is that all four of those problems apply to me, and I do not see why I should put any intellectual effort into software that I cannot use. And I think that there are a lot of people like me out there.
---
I rejoice that there are owls.
EZ-Jackster to be precise.
It's all coming true!!! Is Bill Joy Sir-Paid-A-Lot's secret identity or something?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
According to RD, Jxta is the noise a cat makes when it catches it's spuds in a door....
When I were your age, all round here were fields...