JXTA in a Nutshell

Chapter 6. JXTA Network Services

In this chapter, we discuss how network services are created, published, and discovered by the JXTA platform. We use the term “network service” to represent any kind of service (web services, legacy services, CORBA services, RMI services, etc.) available on the network. JXTA is as agnostic as possible regarding the service invocation model used to access a network service. JXTA’s pipe construct can create services using pipes as the principal invocation mechanism. But pipes are not required for all network services. Upcoming standards such as WSDL, ebXML, SOAP, and UPnP may be used by a JXTA application to invoke a service once the location of that service has been discovered.

A JXTA application can use a SOAP connection to a WSDL service, an RMI connection to contact a remote server object, or a pipe connection to communicate with a JXTA service. The JXTA platform does not impose any restrictions on the service invocation model used. However, the underlying peer infrastructure will ultimately dictate which service invocation model is used. For example, if a Java runtime environment is not available, an application will not be able to activate a RMI-based service via an RMI call.

The JXTA protocols do not contain a specific service invocation protocol by design. This was done to enable a JXTA application to interoperate with a wide range of services. Due to the large variety of service invocation models and the lack of standards in that ...