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Sun Microsystems

Sun Launches JXTA 106

Posted by michael from the p-p-p-p-p-p-p dept.
Daniel Rall writes: "Project JXTA, originally a research project spearheaded by Bill Joy and Mike Clary, is now an open source effort, with a vision to enable developers to create innovative services and applications. It addresses the need for an open, generalized protocol that interoperates with any peer on the network including PCs, servers and other connected devices." Seems to be a combination of Gnutella and Beowulf clustering - lots of potential.
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Sun Launches JXTA More

Sun Launches JXTA

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  • Yeah, the post was off-topic and a bit of a troll, but your post isn't quite fair either.

    Comparing the scalibility of Linux 2.0 against that of Solaris 8 is ridiculous. The kernel core has changed immensely since then, and anybody who actually needs scalability will be running 2.4.x or a late 2.2.x. Still, Solaris will beat it at the ultrahigh end, which is partially a matter of hardware (though I'd think you'd be able to do pretty well on a high end Alpha), partly due to design (threading model, for example), and partially because of focus- Your average kernel hacker doesn't have a 64-way SMP box sitting at home to test with. This will change though as IBM, Intel, HP, and others get involved

    And I would be surprised if GNU/Linux was largely responsible for a drop in Sun's revenues. There's really no point in buying a sun box if your job doesn't saturate a freenix running on a quad Xeon.

  • Re:huh? (Score:1)

    by Mihg ( 2381 )
    What's the p-p-p-p-p-p-p dept.?

    Think p2p2p2p2p2p2p.

  • Bill Joy: open source titan. (Score:3)

    by slothbait ( 2922 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2001 @06:54PM (#265164)
    I find your post deeply ironic. You seem to be implying that Bill Joy dislikes open source. Perhaps you don't know much about Bill Joy, so I'll inform. Bill Joy was the principle designer of BSD Unix while a grad student at Berkeley. Berkeley Unix was pretty much *the original* open source project. And it was very influential as well...quite a bit of what we know as "unix" and even "the internet" was defined by BSD. And yes: today's FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD projects all descend from this code base and tradition. You could say that Bill Joy is the granddaddy of the BSD world.

    Later, Bill Joy left Berkeley to help start Sun. And yes, he took BSD with him and Sun commercialized it into SunOS. Years later it would morph into the SysV type hybrid called Solaris that we still have, but in the beginning Sun basically sold BSD boxes.

    No doubt now that he is an executive in a closed source company, he views open source OS's as a bit of a threat. But historically, this man has contributed a great deal to the open source cause. Infact, he's probably up there with RMS in terms of code contribution. This should not be ignored.

    --Lenny
  • Rock on, man. Good retort. In addition, the guy wrote the vi editor. C'mon... that makes him cool enough right there.

  • NeWS (Score:2)

    by spitzak ( 4019 )
    Hey Sun! How about the source code to NeWS?

    Maybe you can still redeem one of the biggest sins ever done in Comp Sci...

  • One of the people involved with JXTA is Gene Kan, who was involved with Gnutella from very early on. Sun acquired Infrasearch about a month or so ago, which was Kan's project to develop a search engine based on Gnutella concepts. Naturally, Sun saw something of interest.
  • How does this compare to CORBA - it seems to me to be questing for the same protocol standard... (or am I missing the point?)
  • Every time I hear Sun come out with a new "open source" project, I can't but help surpress a yawn.

    It is clear to me that Sun is far too arrogant to consider anything besides their proprietary Solaris platform (and don't get me started on the SCSL license. Solaris is still proprietary!) a "real" OS. For example, one Sun employee says that "enterprise-class Linux is not ready for the data center, and it will be several years, at best, until this changes". (Look here here [eltoday.com].)

    Until Sun gets rid of their notion that Linux is somehow a toy OS, a notion that caused their sales to drop 73 percent [eltoday.com], I do not think the Linux and open source community should in any way assist Sun. The face that IBM makes a far superior Java VM for Linux than Sun does speaks volumes about each company's committment to Linux.

    - Sam

  • [Company] launches [thing] (Score:3)

    by rho ( 6063 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2001 @03:26PM (#265170) Journal

    You, too, can write Silicon Valley press releases!

    [Thing], originally a research project spearheaded by [famous employee] and [semi-famous employee or soon-to-be famous employee], is now an [buzzword], with a vision to enable developers to create innovative services and applications. It addresses the need for an open, generalized [CS term] that interoperates with any peer on the network including PCs, servers and other connected devices.

    "Beware by whom you are called sane."
  • After reading the PDF's I can't but help see this and beep [bxxp.org] both hunting for the same ground. Thoughts?
  • Any reason you needed to steal that article, rather than just point a link to the original, and perhaps a soundbite from it so that we'd be interested enough to click the link?



    --
  • from faq:
    A: Project JXTA is currently using Issuezilla to track bugs. Issuezilla is an open source bug tracking system developed and used by Mozilla. You use Issuezilla to browse or modify existing bugs, or enter new bugs.

    Sun rename bugzilla to issuezilla for there own use?!! Some image management committee got a little out of control. (Refer customers to Bugzilla? That might imply we have a lot of bugs!).

    And then the page's "developer highlight" on Bill Joy. What the hell?! Bill Joy isn't a "developer" - he is %100 manager. His presentation doesn't drill down into any developer issues - it is a highlevel buzzword laden overview. They get a real developer on screen to get the least bit techy.

    Strange word usage like this comes across too much like marketing for my tastes.

    Ben
  • Oh my, you don't even want to acknowledge this technology basically because Sun doesn't agree with your computing "world view".

    Nice technical argument you have there buddy, must be a pain to work with you !!!
  • How the hell do you pronounce JXTA?
  • I am not sure what any of this has to do with JXTA? JXTA is not tied to any OS or Language and is released under a very broad Apache license.

    I'm not sure what relation you are trying to make between JXTA and Linux. You might as well be commenting that "Who cares if General Electric makes good lightbulbs, their jet engines suck.".

    Bondolo
  • SUN like things to be in java because its their tech

    Java is surposed distributed processing easyer

    but I have done some Corba 3 and RMI and it does not seem any easyer than tradional c and RPC

    BUT is JAXTA serializeable ?

    if this is the case then maybe it has a future

    just museing

    regards

    john jones
  • JXTA looks very much like the Piper project [bioinformatics.org], mentioned on Slashdot before [slashdot.org]. Piper is developing a text shell very much like JXTA, but the big distinction is Piper's "connect-the-dots" GUI, which brings command-line functionality to the GUI -- unlike most modern GUI's, which are really Apple Lisa work-alikes.

    Piper is licensed under the GNU LGPL and is a merger between several GNU-licensed projects. It's community-developed, and the programmers are the copyright holders. It's not controlled by a big corp with big name programmers making big bucks. Stop by and lend a hand if you'd like.

    --
    This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.

  • ...but I'm going to be using Microsoft JXTA instead, because management tells me it's going to be better supported and more reliable, and it will contain all sorts of neat extensions which will link it up with MS Office and Exchange.
  • Besides this being a troll, it's also incorrect. Sun has announced that C interfaces to JXTA will be created.

    -jon

  • if it catches on. Using XML as the protocol works when people have relatively high bandwidth (XML metadata can start to approach the size of the actual data in the document. This doesn't matter on a T1, but it sure does at 33.6). Those embedded devices which are mentioned in the JXTA documentation don't tend to have fat pipes hooked up to them...

    Not tying JXTA to Java is smart, as is Open Sourcing it. It could become a nice end-run around .NET-specific services (client-server is just a degenerate case of P2P, and on the server side, JXTA could be used to load-balance and store data).

    Fun stuff is happening.

    -jon

  • That's not quite what the docs say. I've got the Techincial Overview in front of me, and what it says on Pages 7-8 is that "In practice, [JXTA] uses XML as the encoding format, mainly for its convenience in parsing and for its extensibility." They do mention that "If the world decides to abandon XML tomorrow and uses YML instead, JXTA can be simply re-defined and re-coded to use the YML format." I wonder how simple "simply" really is.

    The tech overview then goes on to address my concerns, which are that small devices won't have to have XML parsers (just the ability to recognize canned strings of XML) and that they are working on specifying a subset of XML called MicroXML to be the actual XML understood by JXTA.

    JXTA is looking pretty good. Bill Joy has really been thinking this stuff out.

    -jon

  • Overall, I'd say you're right -- I did go a bit off the deep end in the comparison scheme of things, but I guess I was just making sure I made my point ;) One thing that I disagree with:

    There's really no point in buying a sun box if your job doesn't saturate a freenix running on a quad Xeon.

    One very real possibility is if you believe that your job could grow past the ability of a quad Xeon processor. If that's the case, then from the Enterprise computing perspective you're better off starting with (and sticking to) the Solaris/Sparc architecture.

    But I'm not selling any Sun hardware here -- my original post was probably too harsh. Eventually (probably over the next few years) Linux will make significant progress in the Enterprise environment... then Sun will have a unique decision to make....

    --Mid

  • There is this crazy concept in computer programming called Major releases and Minor releases. A Major release is when you change a Major thing (like the # of processors you can support), whereas a Minor release is when you change a minor thing.

    I can't explain it better than that without doing much research. That said, can you concretely tell me that you've seen a 2.4 kernel running on more than 4 processors? No fair lying when you're posting as an AC....

    --Mid

  • Re:Sun does not respect nor fully support Linux (Score:3)

    by MidKnight ( 19766 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2001 @03:19PM (#265186)
    Not to pick a fight, but how is this relevent to the JXTA announcement? It sounds like you're moaning just to hear your own voice.

    But since you changed the topic, make sure you understand what that Sun employee is talking about -- an "Enterprise-Class" machine is an extremely scaleable SMP box, that can support a huge amount of memory, and has I/O bandwidth out the wazzoo (technical term, of course).

    The theoretical limit in the 2.0 Linux kernel (from what I remember) is 16 processors, although I've never seen anyone get more than 4 running at once. Contrast that with a Solaris/Sparc box which, currently, you can buy a 64-way box, and by year's end you'll be able to buy a 128-way box. Oh yeah, and the theoretical limit is over 1024 processors.

    As far as I/O bandwidth goes, you're not really going to get all that much out of an x86 box with a single PCI bus. Since IBM is now on the Linux bandwagon, we might start seeing them build high I/O boxen sometime soon (hopefully running on PowerPC, a chip which can scale in MP terms almost as well as the Sparc III). But, that's still in the future.

    Finally, you should get some kind of an award for your insinuation that Linux was responsible for Sun's sales to drop 73 percent.... I mean, I love Linux as well, but that's stretching things quite a bit!

    My $0.02,

    --Mid

  • Webster defines standard as:

    Main Entry: 1standard
    Pronunciation: 'stan-d&rd
    Function: noun
    Etymology: Middle English, from Old French estandard rallying point, standard, of Germanic origin; akin to Old English standan to stand and to Old English ord point -- more at ODD
    Date: 12th century
    1 : a conspicuous object (as a banner) formerly carried at the top of a pole and used to mark a rallying point especially in battle or to serve as an emblem
    2 a : a long narrow tapering flag that is personal to an individual or corporation and bears heraldic devices b : the personal flag of the head of a state or of a member of a royal family c : an organization flag carried by a mounted or motorized military unit d : BANNER
    3 : something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example : CRITERION
    4 : something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality
    5 a : the fineness and legally fixed weight of the metal used in coins b : the basis of value in a monetary system
    6 : a structure built for or serving as a base or support
    7 a : a shrub or herb grown with an erect main stem so that it forms or resembles a tree b : a fruit tree grafted on a stock that does not induce dwarfing
    8 a : the large odd upper petal of a papilionaceous flower (as the pea) b : one of the three inner usually erect and incurved petals of an iris
    9 : a musical composition (as a song) that has become a part of the standard repertoire

    SUN's Jxta set of standards is 'open (speech and beer), assuming they know what they are doing they have some authority and most importantly it is explicitly intended to be picked up by the community. Looks like a standard to me. Besides C++ was only standardized very recently and nobody has sofar bothered to implement that standard in full. The value of a standard by your definition is dubious to say the least. I think you are just pissed off because SUN gets to set the standards.
  • Oh duh. Another Linux winnie. Go grow up. And why should Sun bother with Linux when they have their own excellent OS? Do you really want Sun to go the way of SGI? Compaq? Sun is the only unix vendor that did not add Linux offereings to its products and look, Sun still sells more servers than IBM, Compaq, HP or SGI (all of which include a weird mix of Win2k, unix and Linux products to confuse themselves and their customers).

    For example, one Sun employee says that "enterprise-class Linux is not ready for the data center, and it will be several years, at best, until this changes". (Look here here.)

    But Linux is not! He is right. When I start comparing Linux "datacenter" features vs. Solaris I want to laugh. This is spoken by someone who sysadmins dozens of Linux and Solaris boxen every day.

  • Regarding Linux running on more than 4 processors, it does actually run with more than 4, and more than 16. Slashdot ran this article awhile back: http://slashdot.org/articles/00/09/27/1825242.shtm l [slashdot.org] about a 31 processor Alpha EV67 machine. The reader comments also had a link to this document http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/BogoMips-1.html #ss1.3 [linuxdoc.org] about the highest known BogoMips values.
  • The people running Linux 2.newest.release
    on boxes with more than 2 processors seems
    to have better things to do than to read
    slashdot ;) so requiring people to actually
    have seen/done it themselves in order to be
    allowed to speak up is not fair.

    That aside there is regularily postings on
    linux-kernel with people testing on 8-way
    intel boxes. There have also been posted a
    dmesg (by Peter Rival, I think) of Linux
    booting successfully on a Alpha Wildfire
    with 31 processors.

    I cannot recall anything concrete from the
    SGI people, but I think that they also are
    running Linux on more than 4 processors.

    *That* aside, I think that you are right
    in your belief that Sun/Solaris is much
    better for the enterprise currently. Unless,
    of course, that you need serious iron and
    have a bunch of loosely coupled services.
    AND have money and need for scalability.
    Then Linux on IBM's z-series will make a
    SUN setup to shame.
  • "What the hell?! Bill Joy isn't a "developer" - he is %100 manager. "

    He wrote Vi. It was while ago but it was very cool. What have you done lately? Anything that comes close to wrting Vi? Maybe managing a good chunk of a huge company like SUN?
  • It's obvious you have never used vi.

    My point is that he doesn't HAVE to code anything. He did an awsome thing (something you can't claim) and has proven himself both as a coder and as a manager (something you can't claim). Any two bit asshole idiot like yourself can post on slashdot saying "what has a done recently". I tell you what he has done. He got off his butt and made a difference in the lives of thousands of people. He is till working to shape the future in his image, he is still working his ass off trying to come up with better ideas for how computing should be. He doesn't have to he is rich as hell. He does not have to work another day in his life. He could lie on some private island and have nubile young women bring him drinks. But he works anyway.

    What the hell did you do today (besides whine on slashdot that is)?
  • [It] is now an open source effort, with a vision to enable developers to create innovative services and applications

    Great! As a programmer, I've always longed for something like that. No matter how hard I or my colleagues have tried, we have not been able to make either services or applications that were at all innovative. I'm glad that these guys are finally doing something about it. No more thinking about these program things that I could write! Now, programmers everywhere will be able to turn the designs that they've had in their heads for the last 60 years and turn them into real programs! I've had this idea for a while about a program that displayes remotely stored pages of what I call 'hypertext'. Maybe I should patent it...

    Honestly, these guys are the best people to enable me to proactively leverage my synergies and grow my productivity so that the whole is more than the sum of the parts!

    --
    SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
  • ...we're gonna have problems. Let's hope one of the directions for the project is to add some self-organizing behavior so that we can set up a hierarchy dynamically. That would eliminate the problem of search propagation. I realize it's a difficult problem, but it would be very cool. Imagine an OpenNap or Gnutella network that was like a Hydra - you shut down one directory node, and the network re-organizes to anoint another one. Just try to shut down that kind of network! Too bad we can't do it like SMB browser elections - it's too easy to hijack the process. Besides, the packet waste with a browser election (or just the NMB protocal in general) is phenomenal.

  • I meant to say phenomenal if it were applied to a large-scale network like the whole Internet - thank god for firewalls and ping timeouts!

  • The problem is that searching does not scale on Gnutella. On any medium-to-large-size GnutellaNet, the packets generated by sending a search request quickly overwhelms the available bandwidth, so that soon the entire network is saturated with nothing but searches. The article we discussed in this story [slashdot.org] spelled it out quite clearly mathematically. A GnutellaNet eventually segments because it simply can't meet the demand for searches. So your GnutellaNet where you found 1832 instances of Beatles.mp3 was probably only one of hundreds or thousands of GnutellaNets worldwide, none of which can talk to eachother. Not very scalable P2P, is it?

  • Issuezilla is what CollabNet calls their modified version of Bugzilla. They've done a lot of work on it to make it work with the rest of SourceCast and use the separate name to make sure that people don't confuse the two as the *same* thing.

    And Joy, come on, he's one of the reasons you have *BSD.

  • Did you even read the info???

    Did you? I'm asking because you said this:

    The JXTA protocol(s) etc are going to be STANDARDS that can be worked into ANY application, regardless of programing language.

    Where on the JXTA site does it meantion the word "STANARD"? Does it meantion ANSI? W3C? Any standards body? I'm afraid you've bought in to the Sun(TM) Patented(TM) Misuse(TM) of(TM) Language(TM). You've fallen prey to the same trick that Sun(TM) used to convince the great unwashed that Sun(TM) Java(TM) is a STANDARD.

  • I read through this PDF, and guess what, I still have no clue at all what this things does. I really don't need another shell to run talk on. And heck, this introduction might as well be introduction to <your-fav-shell-here>. This PDF teaches me how to use the following:

    • man
    • w or who
    • rusers
    • id
    • talk
    • cat
    • find or locate

    and a few other intuitive commands which is only available in JXTA. Maybe they should put some sample code that allows me to compute 1 to 1e+100 in a distributed manner (not that I would want to do it, but at least gives me a better sense of JXTA). Or am I totally not understanding this JXTA thing? Oh wait, I didn't know it to begin with....

    I dont really need another intro to UNIX... (nor I guess most people who read this)

  • I am happy that Sun has stepped up to try to do this. Someone needs to step in and arbitrate p2p protocol and prevent balkanization like what has started to happen with Gnutella (iirc).

    On the other hand, Sun will probably get sued for contributory infringement for attempting to be the protocol arbitrator. (Remember, the entertainment industry has sued and will sue anything that threatens to disrupt the way they do business.) On the other hand, I can't think of a better company than Sun to fight this fight. Remember that the time-and-space-shifting precedent for VCRs was established 20 years ago as the result of a hard-fought court case between corporations. Better to have someone with some money in the bank to fight this fight.

    --mark

  • Exactly, I downloaded it, got the shell up and running, only to discover it doesn't DO ANYTHING. I can't even TALK to anyone, because there's no way to see who's "Logged in to talk"... so it's not even as capable as IRC.

    Without an application to see SOME functionality, even if it's just an IRC clone, I don't get it.

    --Mike--

  • Too used to boring meetings, this article just triggered my Bullshit bingo reflex....

  • I just picked up working with RPC in C after several years working with CORBA, RMI, and other more recent protocols, and I have to agree completely. RPC really is a very nice and simple distributed invocation protocol. See my sig to check out how I am using it.

    In case you are interested, I've also written an XML stream for XDR (the data translation layer of RPC) so that structures can be deserialized and reserialized easily to XML, but without giving up XML's loose coupling. I wrote up an article on the idea here [sourceforge.net].

  • Gawd I hate the trend toward trying to XML everything. Why in the world would you want to use XML as a protocol? For message content, fine.

    But for encapsulation? MIME is much better at framing a message.

    For a protocol? SMTP and HTTP are fine protocols...

    Is there some reason that this is more legibile than SMTP?

    <xml>
    <error>550</error>
    <msg>We don't accept mail from spammers</msg>
    </xml>

    Yuck!

  • ... their sales to drop 73 percent ...

    Liar. Net income dropped 73%. There are a ton of reasons why that would be so, even if they sold MORE servers than in the last reporting period and had higher revenue from sales. Ever heard of acquisitions, R&D, that sort of thing?

    If you're gonna offer a gratuitous bash, do it right.

    Besides, plenty of companies ignore Linux. There isn't a moral imperative to support Linux. And Linus would be the first to agree with me.

    Microsofties, Linuxheads - same song, different verse.

  • It looks like there will also be a C implementation (!). :)

  • Sorry, these links should work better:

    Vita Nuova [vitanuova.com]

    Plan 9 [bell-labs.com]

  • Plan 9 and Inferno do this better and more simply (Score:3)

    by porttikivi ( 93246 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2001 @11:13PM (#265210)

    Looks like there is a trend of inventing half-baked complex "protocol based" distributed systems, ever struggling to find a decent basic abstraction for generalized communication between application processes in different machines: proprietary RPC mechanisms, myriad in-compatible application spesific XML languages, JXTA "pipes", Linda/Jini tuples, CORBA "objects" and finally a hodgepodge of classical text line based TCP/IP application protocols with a mix of transport and presentation layer issues unsolved.

    Plan 9 "only" has distibuted files. With dynamic, on-the fly synthesized algorithmic response. With authentication, security and distributed user management with group rights. With naming and access categorization bits.With unified interface for intra-node and inter-node tarffic. With straihtforward binding to classical channel stuctures for multiprogramming intra-process messaging and synchronization with a flexible threading concept. With compatibility with all classical local static data file access code and algorithms. With distributed inheritance and with stackable half-transparent union directories.

    Download Rob Pike's and friends' Plan 9 and Inferno from Vita Nuova pages and onwards to Bell Labs pages.

  • Quit yer sorry whining. Try find the documents specifying the protocol and API instead of whine here.

    - Steeltoe

  • There is more to JXTA than just p2p file transfer. I think the really interesting application of this technology is as a software agent space.

    The JXTA services layer includes features that allow the agent to propergate it's self, it includes services allowing searching and indexing.

  • [disclaimer: I am a professional Java developer]

    Thank goodness somebody else sees this. I think somewhere on the collective open-source-community consciousness is written the words "linux: good - anything produced by a Big Company: bad".

    JXTA may or may not be a Good Thing, and it may or may not make a difference in the world. But at least read a little something about it before slamming it, folks.
  • It does not provide any additional functionality
    than berkeley sockets and SUN RPC. Just proves that "p2p" is just fashionable marketing buzzword.
  • Actually, Gnutella is a protocol. What happens is whenever you create a prototype P2P program like Gnutella, you find out how it communicates, and then you could call it your protocol. Gnutella was a program first, protocol second. But now with the proliferation of clients, it becomes a protocol. I guess the same thing applies to Napster and OpenNap (though I'm not familiar with the way it works). JXTA, on the other hand, starts with the protocol, and is looking for clients and applications.

    I think, though, P2P and distributed networking is trying to realize the dream of "The network is the computer" which I think is a quote attributed to Scott McNealy, if I'm not mistaken. hmm....

  • ObDisclaimer: I am not speaking in an official capacity for Invisible Worlds here. That said, I think JXTA is pretty interesting. From where I sit, I can see at least one clueful thing to do with BEEP and JXTA. Incidentally, BXXP.org will be retired soon. Try Beepcore.org for the freshest BEEP info and code. Beepcore is the replacement for the legacy SpaceKits. Beepcore is available in Java and Tcl flavors, with C and C++ in the works. Also, we use the BSD license for our code. ......... kris Kris Magnusson Site Manager of Beepcore.org Invisible Worlds, Inc.

  • "from the p-p-p-p-p-p-p dept."

    What's the p-p-p-p-p-p-p dept.?

    Peace,
    Amit
    ICQ 77863057
  • What's Joy done recently?

    Well, after Berkeley Unix and stuff like vi and being involved with designing the first Sun worksations and the first Sparc processors he's been involved with designing the Majc processor, tonnes of Java stuff, Jini and JXTA, for example, as well as holding a senior role in a huge, very successful company.

    Is that enough?
  • I know there is a tendancy (and well justified, I suppose) to associate anything from Sun that starts with "J" to be a Java project.. but this is not the case with JXTA.. it's a short form for "Juxtapose" to acknowledge that peer-to-peer is essentially "backwards" from the standard client-server model.

    So to reiterate, JXTA is just a protocol, it is not a Java package.

    So no, it cannot be serialized anymore than HTTP could be.

  • Yes... Java I/O leaves a lot to be desired, especially its non-interruptible blocking read()'s. (Although I'm not sure why you think it would require 2 threads per connection. You only need 1 thread per connection, or far far fewer if you take a polling approach)

    However, Java 1.4 (Merlin) [sun.com] is nearing completion and they have a new I/O API [sun.com] coming designed specifically for scalibility.. I guess we will have to wait and see.

  • JXTA is not Java (Score:3)

    by Wraithlyn ( 133796 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2001 @02:25PM (#265221)

    JXTA is not a Java package, it is a language independant protocol spec. Most of the work done so far is on the lowest Core layer, which involves services such as peer discovery and grouping. They have written an early IMPLEMENTATION of this in Java.. and why not? Java was built for platform independance and networking.

    But anyone can write an implementation in any language they want. It uses XML for communication.

    My company has recently become involved [jxta.org] in JXTA as we are developing a pure Java P2P file sharing app called File Rogue. [filerogue.com] (I am lead coder)

  • It looks like JXTA is so low-level that stuff like scaling isn't even defined; as the docs say "JXTA does not mandate how messages are propogated."

    Imagine an OpenNap or Gnutella network that was like a Hydra - you shut down one directory node, and the network re-organizes to anoint another one. Just try to shut down that kind of network!

    This sounds a lot like the Chord protocol from MIT. When one node leaves the network, it moves all the metadata it is holding to a nearby node. Since each Chord node holds (more or less) the same amount of metadata, there are no large targets to go after (and shutting down nodes doesn't hurt the network anyway).
  • That's a good point. What I meant was that Gnutella and Napster are high-level application protocols that are designed to do something specific (share files, in this case). JXTA is more low-level; it's totally general and doesn't actually do anything.

  • What JXTA is (Score:3)

    by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Wednesday April 25, 2001 @02:42PM (#265224) Homepage
    Honestly, I don't think it's all that similar to Beowulf clustering (which tends to be focused on high performance or high availability, while JXTA trades off performance for portability/implementability) and the only similarity to Gnutella is that it's peer-to-peer.

    The most obvious difference between JXTA and the popular P2P systems (like Napster, Gnutella, Freenet, Mojo Nation, Jabber, etc.) is that JXTA isn't an application; it's a toolkit for building P2P apps. Unfortunately, that means in the short term it doesn't really do anything. But it appears (from a very cursory inspection of the docs) to handle mundane details like finding other peers, sending messages (over a variety of protocols apparently including Bluetooth, not just TCP), relaying through NATs and firewalls, etc.

    If you want to play with JXTA, the Getting Started PDF [akamai.net] has a tutorial for using the shell.

    BTW, here's a convenient Mac OS X package of the JXTA Shell [felter.org] since Sun didn't build one.
  • What's there is good as far as it goes.
    But there's so little protocol documentation!
    It's mostly undefined activity happening on an
    undefined network. One shouldn't have to
    reverse engineer the protocol from the source code. They must have more doc than this,
    since applied meta has a C++ implementaiton.
  • No, it's like defining TCP without defining IP
    first. There's nothing under it. So it's
    impossible to implement it. The only way
    to interoperate is to reverse engineer the
    code. And Sun is holding out, I know, because
    Applied Metacomputing is interoperating C JXTA
    with the Java JXTA, so there has to be more doc
    internally.
  • uhhhhh, didn't you notice those two guys are both VPs of marketing? :) IBM has marketroids just like everybody else (even VA Linux/OSDN/Slashdot). We don't take any of their spewage at face value when it comes to facts.

  • Using XML as the protocol works when people have relatively high bandwidth (XML metadata can start to approach the size of the actual data in the document. This doesn't matter on a T1, but it sure does at 33.6).

    But the docs say XML is not required. With a little recoding you can use something else down the line. Also I didn't get the impression that the XML stuff was elemental, meaning using the shell to find files and such involves no XML. The actual messaging is binary.


  • You, too, can write Silicon Valley press releases!

    [Thing], originally a research project spearheaded by [famous employee] and [semi-famous employee or soon-to-be famous employee], is now an [buzzword], with a vision to enable developers to create innovative services and applications. It addresses the need for an open, generalized [CS term] that interoperates with any peer on the network including PCs, servers and other connected devices.

    Ok, lemmy try,

    [My dog], originally a research project spearheaded by [The President of the United States] and [myself], is now an [Global Enterprise], with a vision to enable developers to create innovative services and applications. It addresses the need for an open, generalized [hardware interrupt] that interoperates with any peer on the network including PCs, servers and other connected devices.

    Mmm....

  • >> Bill Joy isn't a "developer" - he is %100 manager.

    > Not true. His code is out there.

    Such as...? Give an example of some recent code by Bill Joy's then.

    I'll be *very* suprised if he has written anything non-trivial for years.

    Bill Joy has written some pretty important stuff; like the original vi. And at this point he doesn't have to code. He can just sit back , dream stuff up, and have other people actually write it.


  • He said that while everyone has been talking about this "Open Source" thing, he just wanted software components to work well consistently, something that he doesn't believe Open Source does particularly well.

    Sun will advocate Open Source when it in convenient. Do not be mislead as to their intentions.

    So to advocate Open Source he must lie and say that all Open Source works great? I'd say it's a pretty accurate statement on his part. In fact I'd say, Open Source code is a flea-market of mostly crap. And even when it does work the code is ugly. Please name one open source project that works well, has clean code with decent comments, is documented even a little, and written in a way that is extensible.


  • Hey Sun! Get lost! ...And take the marketroids with you!

    Ok, I know this ones a troll but the sentiment of other comments doesn't sound good. What's the problem? So Sun is a Mega-Corp. But the're giving us stuff! They did the whole Open Office [openoffice.org] thing. And now they give us JXTA which is not some worthless bone thrown out of Bill Joy's garbage bin but something that could potentially make Gnutella, Napster, and Freenet look like tin cans with some string. They've got specs. Thats the kind of organization OSS projects need. When was the last time you saw an OSS project with a spec. Never. Invariably, you just start typing and half the time it turns out to be crap. Whatever the truth is, you should look at the software before posting fooling comments. I suspect the normal people are off looking at the white-paper.

  • Apache. Mozilla. KDE. GNOME. JBoss. Python. Linux. BSD. GIMP. Konquerer. SAMBA. TCL.

    The code for all of these is clean? Mozilla works well? You wanna tell me where the documentation for Samba is please? Guess which company John Ousterhout worked for while doing some of his most significant work on the Tcl language? You guessed it, Sun Microsystems.

  • It's released under the apache (read: bsd style) license.

    pathetic trolls bother me.



  • one Sun employee says that "enterprise-class Linux is not ready for the data center

    Sorry, but they're right, and that doesn't mean that they think linux is a toy OS. Even google has admitted in interviews that as cool as linux is, it leaves a lot to be desired and was a pain for them to scale. The same goes for windows. Yes, the number 2 suite of sites (Microsoft) runs on Windows. This doesn't mean that windows is ready for the enterprise. Both CAN scale if needed, but does it scale WELL?

    Sun is just saying that you don't need 5,000+ (see Google) servers for redundancy because 1-2 of their enterprise servers will do the trick.
  • Hmm, I heard that jxta was actually written by collab.net [collab.net], a most interesting SF-based collaboration company.... however I can't find any corroboration for this on either site, anyone got any leads on this?
  • vi might have been hot shit in the age of line editors, but even if i had written vi, i wouldn't be going around bragging about it nowadays...or holding it up as some sort of testament of greatness whilst hero worshipping either, for that matter.

    what coding of bill's can you point to recently to show that he's still 'da man'?

  • Did you even read the info???

    The JXTA protocol(s) etc are going to be STANDARDS that can be worked into ANY application, regardless of programing language.

    Furthermore, I believe, that all comunication (Between Peers, etc) is using XML anyway.

    This project is AWESOME!!!!! Finally, a standard for Peer-to-Peer! yay!!!
  • The Register has this reaction [theregister.co.uk]:

    No Joy from P2P vets for Sun's Jxta

    By: Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco [mailto]

    Posted: 26/04/2001 at 00:52 GMT

    Sun wheeled out its Mount Rushmore of cerebral greats - Gage, Joy, Gosling - to herald the unveiling of its Jxta peer-to-peer project today.

    Announced by Bill Joy at the O'Reilly P2P conference in February, Jxta (pronounced "Juxta") is now live and we're awash with positioning papers, technical documentation and real downloadable code. But the instant reaction from the peer-to-peer community - who've been at this for a little while longer - was cool.

    "It's no good for FreeNet, next to no use for MojoNation or Gnutella, and no good for SETI at home," FreeNet developer Adam Langely told us. "It is buzzword compliant, though."

    And Jxta's reliance on XML brought an "Oh my god," from the developer - a contributor to the excellent O'Reilly P2P book, Disruptive Technologies - who's juggling a rewrite of the FreeNet core in C++ whilst studying for his GCSEs.

    It's not as if the guest of honour has marched in to the P2P party, wolfed down the free booze and fondled the hostess. Almost, but not quite.

    This party doesn't really need a guest of honour it seems, even if it is Sun itself in best-behaviour mode. Bill Joy modestly described Jxta as a project that attempts to define protocols, that's all. Within a year he told us today, we might have enough usable protocols to embed in some real devices.

    But watching these billionaire new frontiersmen earnestly describe the problems that P2P networks need to overcome, after we've watched 18 months of very public sweat and anguish from the Gnutella, FreeNet et al networks as they tackle these problems, strikes as the definition of redundancy.

    "These networks develop in vertical silos, and they don't interoperate," said Gage in his introduction today. Which is true: "The P2P projects have nothing in common except TCP/IP", agrees Langely. But far from being their weakness, it's really their strength. Gnutella began life as a brute force, quick-and-dirty mechanism for file sharing, and FreeNet as a long term project to build a secure space free from surveillance. To adopt Sun's Jxta plumbing would not only entail throwing away these hard-won lessons, but it would compromise what each network was created to do. For example, FreeNet is inundated with offers of help to turn it into a platform for instant messaging, a global anonymous email gateway, or the new Napster. Take your pick. But as FreeNet luminary Brandon Wiley unfailingly points out - FreeNet is uniquely useful for dissidents in China (it was inspired by Ross Anderson's Eternity service [cam.ac.uk] meme) - so please don't mess it up.

    The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and indeed, well-though-out but pointlessly blue-sky RFCs, and Sun's error is really in mistaking social spaces for technical problems. This conundrum was best illustrated at the O'Reilly conference when a panel moderator (forgive us, we can't remember which one, and we paraphrase liberally here) asked: "Is there a P2P? Is there a P2P business model? Or will it be like client/server? Will we be sitting around at a client/server conference in a year's time?"

    So Sun's Jxta is a technology project looking for social uses, and the P2P networks are social projects looking for technology solutions, and the two seem to be passing each other like the proverbial ships in the night.

    But let's get some perspective: it's a benign adventure, and doesn't deserve the rancour that say, a Microsoft P2P 'solution' - let your imaginations run riot here, folks - would attract. We've seen so many such pogroms in the past (Pen Windows, anyone?) that trample over not only optimistic start-ups, but entire business models, and with Jxta being the hesitant Apache-licensed venture that is, comparisons don't stand up to scrutiny.

    As if P2P had never happened
    We'll go into the technical details when we've had time to digest them (comments welcome), but Jxta's a layered set of protocols tackling not just interoperability but monitoring and performance too.

    If you were starting from scratch, then Jxta would be an obvious place to go. The monitoring stuff is nice, as plenty of fringe edge networking gets proscribed by vigilant BOFHs, fearful of congestion at network and disk choke-points. And not just BOFHs, either - any local ISP worth its salt should by now have recognised that P2P is a loyalty/community trump card, too.

    Interestingly, Joy is thinking small with Jxta. It could be, he suggested, a way of steering users between the mess of access networks that we'll be faced with pretty soon - between 2.5G GPRS/EDGE packet data, 802.11 networks, and our local LAN or dial-up connections. "Devices are too small to carry ten protocol stacks," said Joy optimistically, without quite convincing us that a Jxta-enabled device would solve the problem. But give the man credit, he's looking for an answer to a problem most folk haven't even recognised yet. Unfortunately, the conversation took a turn into the utterly surreal, as Joy began to explain how embedded IP devices in schoolkids' sneakers could cause havoc for teachers, and how Jxta-enabled sneakers would solve the problem, because of their device recovery and monitoring characteristics. Sensibly, and abruptly, Gage drove the conversation back on to dry land before anyone had time to notice.

    Let's kill the geeks
    But if the distress in the people's P2P community wasn't enough, the opprobrium unleashed on the P2P meme by a lordly tech press is nothing short of astonishing.

    "Bill Joy is catching the tail end of a euphoria that never came into existence," declares the New York Times, grandly.

    The CNet/ZDNet conglomerate has outsourced its opinion to Gartner Group analysts, who opine:

    "Sun was careful to avoid the term P2P, not wanting to be associated with a technology that appears to be going out of fashion." A fashion created by ... analysts such as Daryl Plummer and David Smith as recently as last August, we seem to remember.

    Ouch! Since when were the NYT and CNet such pernickety style mongers, we wonder?

    Ever since they had the P2P meme foisted upon them, we suspect, and there's more than a hint of snobbishness at attempting to bury an idea that the geek press had the temerity to name before they did. O'Reilly might not have named P2P - we're not absolutely sure who did, and we really couldn't care less - but the meme left the industry elite gasping for air, and without an industry elite to follow, the industry-led tech press was left experiencing a kind of zero-gravity for the first time. The Fourth Estate marches to a well regulated beat. OK, we'll give you 'Open Source' as a rebranding excercise, you can hear them think, but P2P, that's just too much weird shit...

    P2P networks, or whatever they'll be called now, are about to be touted as the saviour of Europe's 3G crisis, for the very simple reason that they're communication [firstmonday.org] rather than content based. And while we don't claim to predict the future, that it's a model that's as sane as anything else on the table.

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

  • Apparently, it's about this:

    404 File Not Found

    Got that on trying to read the FAQ and the background pages.

    Very Sun, I think. Maybe they should stop the vaoprware approach.

  • Make it easier? Here is a hype balloon that Sun
    so eagerly tries to blow every time. Sometimes
    it catches on, sometimes it doesn't. Bill Joy
    is smart man and he made money at it.
    I do not belive into stuff like easier, because
    as always learning new infrastructures that
    will make your life "easier" really means three things:
    1. Spending more time educating yourself
    2. trading things that you know by heart for new
    easier methodology produced by a corporation
    whose sole motive is to a. make money b. dominate
    the world to keep making money.
    3. Easier stuff means that inventors made it
    easier to develop systems with tools that are
    token sized.

    New stuff in by no means bad. However computing
    field being full of marketing people and others
    who try to push their ideas into the wild, you
    got to be really cautious of those hype bombs
    that just may explode into your face.
    Often people try to save their face, if they did
    invest alot of time into something, stupid by
    promoting it, thus justifying their effort.

    Be cautios, do your homework, gain experience,
    don't let misguided , misguide you =)
  • Didn't Microsoft patent the letter 'X' for their buzzwords?
  • JXTA does not mandate how messages are propogated

    Its sort of like the IP protocol, which needs TCP built on top of it to guarantee that all packets are delivered properly. This make their protocol very flexible and lets others build on top of it just like TCP/IP was built.
  • Jxta will probably be an important part of Sun One [sun.com] (Open Net Environment). One is Sun's response to Microsoft's Net-initative.

    It's a bit strange that Sun goes from being the great advocate of fat servers and thin clients to this peer-to-peer protocol. But I guess the popularity of Napster gave them a vision of what might come, so why not embrace it.

    I'm sure we'll see alot more about Net vs. One in the news from now on...

  • OK, Maybe this is a wee bit offtopic, but it's the guinness speaking...

    But I consider Bill Joy to be one of my personal gods! Like the internet? It's his doing! (he coded the tcp/ip stack for an early bsd unix)

    Sure, java and jini are both projects he's at least been attributed to (if not whollt responsible for) but to say he's 100% manager is (as far as I'm concerned) blasphemous! (OK, his hair *is* a little pointy, but I digress. He's 100% genius and maybe he's good at managing...)

    If you ask me, if he can explain high-tech, cutting edge complex concepts to the morons who really do the management, he's already OK in my book. That and the fact that he's *probably* doing some of the coding for this stuff puts him in near deification. That and the fact he's been doing it since I was born causes me to worship the keyboard he codes on.

    OK, now that I've lost most of my karma I'll continue drinking... X^P (hiccup!)
  • Sun is planning to roll out a C port shortly. Also, they "anticipate alternate implementations for other programming environments... including Perl."
  • They unveil the system at 11 AM PDT today, and some 5.5 hours later, they have 346 CVS commits...
  • this is a troll??? you moderators been smokin' glorious amounts of crack again? Seems to me this guy, albeit a spork, asked a legit question. Do we really need JXTA?

    So tell me, do we? I don't think so. I happen to agree with him.

    Troll my ass, you're just pissed off becuase he joined the "spork-nation".

    Get over it, people. Let the sporks play - and in this case, let the sporks ask what they want - especially when it is relevant.

    Dumbass overzealous moderators.

    my rant is complete, thank-you and good day.

  • What exactly is it, you'd think they'd leave some kind of detail of it on the page, but only when you read the white pages do you get any real detail. If only companies would be up front and stop leaving blanket statements then they'd see some good interest in their products
  • Metadata must be transmitted at some point. The cost of it is transmitting bulkier parsers; custom parsers often aren't size/speed optimized because there are so many of them. And plus, custom formats tend to grow to the point where they carry their own metadata in a flexible format anyway.

    Though I agree there is some cost in some situations, it is outweighed by the possibility of writing apps that were unfeasible beforehand -- like a decent linuxconf, where you must aggregate a great deal of different config file formats.
  • Bill Joy isn't a "developer" - he is %100 manager.

    Not true. His code is out there.

    Dancin Santa
  • Obviously, I can't say. Suffice it to say that he likes 'tricky' code and has quite an ego.

    Dancin Santa
  • It's pronounced "juxta" as in "juxtaposed to anything that might come out of Microsoft".

    Dancin Santa
  • Free beer is something I'd quickly agree to.

    Open beer? How do I know you're not pissing in the can? Of course, I wouldn't be able to tell if you were offering an American beer.

    Dancin Santa
  • I would be highly suspect of any company that GPL's software (such as OpenOffice) that relies on proprietary software to run (Java).
  • I'm not sure what you mean by the statement that gnutella has problems scaling. It has been humming along just fine for the past few months. I'm making a Beatles cd for my dad, and did a search this morning on 'Beatles mp3' and got back 1832 matches. Gnutella is doing just fine.
  • The total interconnectedness of all the nets doesn't really matter that much. As long as you are able to search a few thousand neighbors, you are generally going to find just about anything you want. Adding more users at this point is not going to degrade the performance of the network, only make more of them.
  • Oh, and the nets do all talk to each other because of the transience of the connections within them. Have you ever sat and watched the number of hosts that connect and disconnect from you when you are running limewire. It usually takes 20 minutes before it settles down on a set of stable connections, and even then, it is very unusual for any single client to stay connected for more than an hour.
  • Best guess at MS' lookalike: ActivePeer
  • Wise up buddy. All companies want your money, even your pal IBM. (or do you work for them)
    This is the company that weasled out of anti-trust by snowballing 10 years, oh and if you want to see what IBM really think of Linux and open source read on...

    IBMs view on open source

    "You can't hold an open-source community accountable," says Dick Sullivan, a VP of marketing in IBM's software group. "Customers say, 'How long do you think I'd last if I told my CIO, I've registered this problem on the Internet and I'm waiting for the open-source community to get it fixed.' It's not in the business culture today."

    IBM on Linux

    "Customers currently running Linux apps might have concerns about management and scalability. So now their Linux app can run with the AIX back end," says Mike Kerr, IBM's VP of marketing for the pSeries.

  • "a notion that caused their sales to drop 73 percent, "

    Linux installations tend to replace older , lower end Sun boxes used for DNS, ftp etc ...
    System running Oracle or Sybase still run Solaris and , as far as I can tell, people are not talking about replacing them with Linux.
    In short, this guy from Sun was rigth.

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