JXTA in a Nutshell

Name

Package net.jxta.pipe

Synopsis

Pipes are the central means of communication between JXTA peers. Although JXTA peers are free to use any means of communication they desire, they will typically use pipes. Doing so allows the peers to take advantage of the services that the JXTA infrastructure provides for pipes, which are logical transports that can span network types and pierce firewalls, all the while transparent to the application.

Pipes are unidirectional: input pipes are used to read messages, and output pipes are used to send messages. Input pipes are connected to output pipes by the pipe service, a core JXTA service.

Like all JXTA resources, pipes are represented by advertisements. JXTA peers can search for pipe advertisements using the discovery service. This follows the normal semantics of that service: pipe advertisements can be retrieved from the local cache at will, or the application can register an object to be notified when a new pipe advertisement is discovered.

Data sent over pipes must be contained within a JXTA message (net.jxta.endpoint.message). JXTA pipes provide no quality of service assurances: messages sent over a pipe may be dropped or arrive out of order at their destination. JXTA supports three kinds of pipes:

UnicastPipe

Plain-text data is sent from one peer to another.

PropagatePipe

Plain text is broadcast from one peer to multiple peers.

UnicastSecurePipe

Encrypted data is sent from one peer to another.

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