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?
Will JXTA eventually prove to be a powerful lever for Sun in its ongoing campaign to best competitors in the critical Web services marketplace? It certainly has the earmarks to accomplish just that. But it all depends heavily upon whether Sun decides to invest the time, money, and effort into bringing the technologies born in the open source community into its proprietary Java development environments on a schedule that can keep apace of developer demand and to help evangelize the Web services-specific benefits of the JXTA protocols.

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.