JXTA is a new technology that enables us to build peer-to-peer systems - systems which enable computers to discover one another and co-operate together across the Internet. This kind of interaction characterizes some of the most interesting networked applications that have appeared in the last year: Napster, Gnutella, Morpheus, and their relatives. In these systems, a user installs a client program, which discovers other installed clients on other machines, and communicates with them - allowing the sharing of files between computers. This peer-to-peer architecture is a completely new paradigm in software design, representing a totally different approach to the standard client-server frameworks used in almost all the distributed systems that currently exist.

JXTA aims to provide a set of technologies that allow programmers to develop clients and services that can interact in this way, without having to implement all of the elements that make up such a system themselves. Aspects such as discovery of peers, advertising presence, penetrating firewalls, and transferring data, which are common to all peer-to-peer applications, are handled by a set of standard libraries that are available to a JXTA application.

What does this book cover?

- The nature of peer-to-peer applications

- The architecture of JXTA

- Using the JXTA Shell

- Developing JXTA applications

- Designing JXTA services

- The future of JXTA