Bill Joy spins the future of P2P

By Ann Harrison
Network World Peer-to-Peer Newsletter, 07/02/01

Sun co-founder and chief scientist Bill Joy was recently at the Java One conference in San Francisco to promote the company's JXTA peer-to-peer architecture. He presented JXTA as a core architecture, which he says will allow developers to easily build distributed applications for P2P networks.

According to Joy, JXTA will help move P2P computing beyond music trading applications by offering a secure development platform. As an open source project, JXTA is freely available to all developers who want to create P2P programs and Joy predicts that soon there will be an abundance of such applications.

So what kind of programs does Joy have in mind? At the show, Joy demonstrated a JXTA application from a start-up called eMikolo. The application, called PeerSwitch, is a file-trading tool that that lets users swap large files such as movies. Instead of downloading the movie from a central server, the user accesses the data from another PC using the PeerSwitch application.

Sun's executives figure that making content from a site more accessible will help drive traffic to that location. Of course speeding up access to highly desirable or controversial content is what mirror sites already do without the benefit of a proprietary application. If the movie or music industry want to use applications like this they had better secure them well.

So far, the so-called content providers seem to want to rely on litigation based on federal laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to make up for weak copy protection systems for file trading. We'll wait and see how this pans out.

Joy also talked up the use of JXTA in the wireless world, which could be a good vehicle for Java. The spread of the language would be encouraged if cell phones, PDAs and other wireless devices embedded with JXTA could share information.

In theory, users of those devices could receive offers in real-time from nearby businesses that are within geographic range. As an example, Joy demonstration a wireless P2P application that would allow nearby gas stations to auction for your business. It also would allow you to join with other cars nearby and arrange volume purchase for discounts.

But do you think drivers would actually want to create a spontaneous buyers club while driving down the highway just to get a few cents off at the pump? Maybe. Lots of drivers seem to have their hands full just talking on their cell phones. But Joy is a pundit these days, and painting the future of P2P is his job. Catch his next show at a conference near you.