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http://www.devx.com/javaSR/articles/interview/zieger-1.asp What does JXTA have to do with Web services? Quite a lot. With JXTA, Sun has an opportunity to leverage the work of this hot open source working group into commercial features that Java developers will want, as well as a secret weapon to help Sun strengthen its competitive position. by Anne Zieger |
| Over the last year, Sun Microsystems' Project JXTA has emerged as one of the leading forces in the nascent peer-to-peer and Web services movement. Having isolated a few common functions execs see as central to enterprise P2P development and developed code to meet these core requirements, Sun is now using JXTA as a launching pad into Web service projects.
As is often the case, Sun is head-to-head with Microsoft in this market, and it is putting this large but still nascent open source project into play in the marketplace alongside Microsoft's .NET. While the .NET initiative is different in important ways—and, quite obviously, it's not an open source effort—it offers developers an infrastructure-oriented, proprietary view of the Web services world, while JXTA proposes to contribute to a developer-driven, evolving set of Web services. Sun is hoping that open source adoption of JXTA's P2P communication protocols will contribute key pieces to its overall Web services offerings to help cement developer loyalties and prevent attrition to .NET.
How JXTA Serves Up Standards
JXTA picks up the ball with open source protocols defining specific Web services/P2P functions. (See the article, "Web Services and JXTA: Companion Technologies" for a detailed discussion of the JXTA communication platform.) The JXTA implementations emerged from Sun's research on what emerging P2P/Web services apps have in common. Roughly two years ago, Sun engineers began studying a group of loosely-related peer-to-peer technologies, including Napster, SETI@Home (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence @ Home scientific project), and the 100-million-user instant messaging phenomenon. The idea was to get a sense of what impact P2P technologies would have on enterprise computing and how to address future needs. Peer-to-peer technologies, generally, applications allowing more or less all network devices to address each other and share data directly, seemed critically important to the future of networking. Along the way, the app-to-app communication known as Web services also leapt out as an important affiliated technology, given its implications for peer-to-peer communication and core XML basis. In both cases, Sun researchers concluded, a lack of standards was slowing down developers. "What we concluded was that all of the solutions available at that time tended to have a bunch of drawbacks stymieing innovation," said Juan Carlos Soto, group marketing manager and JXTA.org community manager for Sun. "They were not interoperable. Also, everyone was having to reimplement all plumbing and mechanisms with their own proprietary setup." What's more, Soto said, all of the solutions Sun engineers studied were PC-based; they didn't take advantage of P2P's strength.
Sun Comes Up with New Core Protocols Why use Java? Aside from the obvious Sun/Java connection, Soto said Sun engineers believed Java would offer developers the most productive environment, especially for network applications. Another factor was Java's flexibility, offering implementations that could work on the widest set of environments, including Solaris, Linux, Windows, and Macintosh operating systems. Then there was the question of finding a platform familiar to a large percentage of developers; in an open source project, it's important to have a large pool from which to draw. "There are a lot of Java developers out there," Soto said. "It was easier to have them contribute to the initial implementation." Once the core set of protocols was finally implemented, Sun passed along the keys to the engine. In April 2001, Sun turned the JXTA protocols over to the open source community under a scheme based on the Apache license. Sun managers are making the license process as simple as possible. Developers are free to download and use code from the JXTA.org site, and, breaking with widespread open source practice, they aren't required to turn code back over the community. When publishing, developers must credit JXTA.org if they credit any commercial components; they may not use the name JXTA in a product without permission from JXTA.org, but those are more or less the entire set of limitations, Soto says.
New Directions
While the developer community around JXTA is varied and active, to date JXTA has not attracted the participation of any of the software giants. More typical are smaller tool vendors such as New York-based Improv Technologies, whose Cirquet platform is designed to simplify the assembly of JavaBeans and Enterprise JavaBeans components. Improv chose to be involved with JXTA because of its architectural advantages. "We did some unique things with our platform in which we abstracted away the messaging layer," said Joe Brookman, Improv's chief marketing officer. "What JXTA does is that it provides the robust messaging transport that gives us the infrastructure and flexibility that we feel is necessary." Also, JXTA is one of the few infrastructures that would allow Improv to communicate with systems across firewalls without the need for its IT department to configure the application (using pipes), Brookman said. "That means that we can deploy rapidly inside the enterprise without having to reconfigure firewall capabilities but still maintain security," he added. When will larger companies begin playing the JXTA game? It's just a matter of time, Brookman contends. "I think some of the larger ISVs are waiting until the technology is a little more mature," Brookman says. "As they see others adopting the technology, then they will follow suit."
How Will Sun Use JXTA Strategically? Sun expects to see many different implementations of JXTA technology emerge in the months ahead and says it intends to let the market determine which ones prevail. "We are committed to an open source community process that lets all interested parties and developers help define, extend, and refine JXTA," said JXTA Project Manager Mike Clary in a recent article on Sun's Java Web site. In an open letter to Java developers three months ago, Clary said the company would continue to "sponsor and actively participate" in the project, despite the lack of revenue. "Sun and many innovative companies are already using the technology, and there is a definite snowball effect," said Clary. "We would not be surprised to see tens of thousands of developers adopting JXTA technologies and tools in the near future. This is big."
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