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.

Comments

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.

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!)

In the end: tts an R&D Project Only!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was involved in the use of JXTA immediately after its launch in April of 2001. I led a team of experienced Java developers who used JXTA to produce a Groove-like product that ran on Linux, Windows, and Sun. Here were our findings:

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!