When the Internet was first conceived, it was in terms of a scalable, worldwide network infrastructure impervious to denial-of-service attacks. The volume of traffic and the volume of data, as well as inadequate indexing and searching technologies have resulted in an Internet that now requires security systems that not only protect a user's system, but also impair the ability to access relevant information. Sun has developed JXTATM technology that has the capability to restore the Internet to its original promise. Janice J. Heiss explores this possibility in her piece entitled, \'JXTA Technology Brings the Internet Back to Its Origin.\'

According to Bernard Traversat, chief architect of JXTA technology at Sun, "With JXTA, we are attempting to build - or perhaps rebuild - on top of the existing Internet a virtual Internet that returns the Internet to its original foundation: a highly decentralized, dynamic and scalable network infrastructure." JXTA manages this, Heiss explains, by providing a set of standard protocols that allows any connected device on the network to self-organize and collaborate in decentralized P2P fashion, creating a deep, extended web. Connected devices could be of virtually any kind - sensors, cellphones, wireless PDAs, PCs and even servers.

Being a TCP/IP protocol, JXTA (short for "juxtapose" or set side-by-side) has multiple language and platform bindings available to it, including JavaTM Platform, Standard Edition (JavaTM SE), JavaTM Platform, Micro Edition (JavaTM ME) and C/C++. Over six million users have downloaded JXTA technology since its emergence in 2001.

The genius of JXTA technology, as Heiss explains it, lies in its ability to allow "...virtual network domains to organize their own content without imposing rigid and restrictive rules or centralized controls, so user communities can use centralized mechanisms when needed. Individual responsibility and individual decision making will allow communities to build themselves from the ground up. The intent of the building blocks is to specify the necessary and sufficient set of network semantics that will define the P2P domain platform."

The virtual P2P network that JXTA technology enables gives peers the ability to communicate without also requiring them to understand or manage network topologies and by standardizing the way in which peers discover one another, develop peer groups and discover peer resources.

JXTA protocols are built on five network abstractions, Heiss observes:

• A logical peer-addressing model spans the entire JXTA network.
• Peer groups let peers dynamically self-organize into a multitude of protected virtual Internet domains.
• Advertisements publish peer resources: peer, peer group, endpoint, service and content.
• A universal binding mechanism, called the resolver, performs all binding operations required in a distributed system.
• Pipes serve as virtual communication channels that enable peers to communicate with each other.

Because JXTA technology is built on a location-independent logical addressing model, and because every network resource has a unique JXTA ID, multiple ID representations can coexist within the same network, and each peer can be addressed independently of its physical IP address. Peers can choose from a variety of so-called "peer endpoints" to either address others or identify themselves, as well as to conceal an IP address from all but trusted peers.

Heiss also points out that JXTA technology can recognize and accommodate the three primary motivations for creating peer groups:

• To create secure and protected Internet domains to exchange contents within an enterprise firewall domain or cross-enterprise workgroup domains
• To create a scoping environment
• To create a monitoring environment

The promise that Heiss sees JXTA as capable of delivering lies in the technology's ability to enable "...a world in which billions of network services, all addressable on the Internet, will be able to discover and interact with each other in an ad hoc and decentralized manner through a multitude of virtual Internet domains." [...read more...]

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