Peer to Peer: Collaboration and Sharing over the Internet

JXTA

Project JXTA—the name (“jux-ta”) is short for Juxtapose, as in side by side—is a Sun Microsystems initiative that seeks to integrate p2p technologies as complementary and distributed tools into a mainstream computing and Internet environment. The actual core platform is a fully decentralized network architecture. However, both centralized and decentralized services can be developed on top of the platform.

It started as a research project incubated at Sun under the guidance of Bill Joy and Mike Clary. The goal is to explore a vision of distributed computing using peer-to-peer topology and to develop basic building blocks and services that would enable innovative applications for peer groups. Recognizing this effort would benefit from outside ...