Getting Up To Speed with JXTA

"Putting things next to each other, which is really what peer-to-peer is about ... having groups of things come into affiliation ... into juxtaposition for a while and then move on." -- Bill Joy, The O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer Conference, 2001

JXTA, or Juxtapose, began in the summer of 2000 as a Sun Microsystems research project, or "intrapreneuring incubation," led by Chief Scientist Bill Joy. Beginning with conversations with innovators in the P2P space, the JXTA team began assembling a picture of what a core common distributed computing framework would look like. In the months since, the sketch became an API, "crufty code," and finally, an open source release on April 25th, 2001.

In this package of JXTA coverage, we offer several perspectives on JXTA:

• "JXTA Takes Its Position," an analysis of the framework, by Rael Dornfest

• "The JuxtaNet," a look at how JXTA may enable a network as popular as Gnutella, by Kelly Truelove

• "Learning the JXTA Shell," a tutorial by Rael Dornfest

After you read all this, be sure to head over to jxta.org and download the binaries, source code, and docs, and start playing with JXTA. Also, look for extensive JXTA coverage at the upcoming O'Reilly P2P and Web Services Conference (East) in Washington, DC from September 18 - 21.

As ONJava.com continues the countdown to the O'Reilly P2P and Web Services Conference over the coming weeks, we will have more advanced feature articles on JXTA, in addition to other P2P Java and Web Services topics including Jini, JavaSpaces, J2EE Web services, and JAX. You should also visit OpenP2P.com as well.

Richard Koman is a freelancer writer and editor based in Sonoma County, California. He works on SiliconValleyWatcher, ZDNet blogs, and is a regular contributor to the O'Reilly Network.

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