Someday billions of devices, from cell phones to super computers, will be connected to the Internet and tapping into services that let them run applications and exchange messages among themselves. Think of it as an expanded Web. If all goes as planned, the days of loading software onto PCs and PDAs will be history.
This is the vision of the future that many smart people at big software companies share, but they call it different things. Microsoft is developing .NET, Intel has its Peer-to-Peer Working Group, and Sun is developing its One strategy. And they are already battling for world dominance.
These Web services need a backbone, and that's what Sun's recently announced Project JXTA is all about. "JXTA provides the little bit of order that will enable the next generation of applications and services to tap into the expanded Web, " says Juan Carlos Soto, Sun's group manager for Product Marketing on Project JXTA and community manager for JXTA.org. "We want JXTA to seed the imagination of the community of developers out there. If we can agree that this is the way that the peer nodes can operate together, than we can get on to creating new applications and services."
What, exactly, does JXTA do? A protocol for distributed computing, JXTA (as in juxtapose) affects three aspects of P2P programming: grouping, in which a node identifies itself, finds others, and makes a group; peer piping for exchanging messages; and peer monitoring which enables administration of peer nodes. In keeping with open-source ideals, the protocol can be used in any language and is available free for developers to download, play with, and contribute to. Currently available in Java, implementations for C and small devices are in the works.
That's how Sun describes it. The rest of the world isn't sure what to do with JXTA just yet. Does JXTA compete with Microsoft's .Net strategy? It may seem so at first glance, since both are designed as open platforms with no language restrictions. .Net, however, is a far-reaching plan that has parts based on XML but really all goes back to Windows products.
".NET is a commercial framework meant to be practical within the year. It aims to define a lot of high-level abstractions such as myWallet and myDEvices, while taking a lot of configurability out of the hands of developers," says Clay Shirky, a partner with the Accelerator Group, which invests in and advises early-stage digital businesses. "Plus, JXTA is open-source, which as we know, saps the vigor of American industry, aids Marxist-Lennist cells in third-world countries, and curdles mother's milk," he jokes.
It's too soon to tell whether JXTA is competing with the Intel-backed Peer-to-Peer Working Group, another P2P camp. "We're certainly looking at it. We're curious. And we continue to hope that Sun will reconsider and join the Peer-to-Peer Working Group," says Bob Knighten, who holds the title of Peer-to-Peer Evangelist at Intel. Some analysts are not impressed. "Until Sun presents a clearer view of this new technology, JXTA will likely remain nothing more than another piece of interesting Sun technology," say Daryl Plummer and David Smith, Gartner Analysts, in a Gartner Viewpoint column on CNET.
Others disagree. "The last cool idea from Sun was Java, so JXTA is worth paying attention to," says Shirky. "It is a fantastically interesting set of ideas about how to create Net that lets any two nodes advertise and share capabilities, while taking almost nothing of the current ecology of the client-server Web for granted."
