Business and Implementation Issues


Every new technology goes through an experimental phase the pluses and minuses of the technology are weighed against the costs and benefits. P2P is no different.

Three main challenges for P2P stand out:

  • Overcoming issues of security and trust

  • Lack of standards

  • Enabling transactions

As has been highlighted, security is one area of strength for centralized systems. Control and lockdown of resources, users, and networks is at the core of centralized systems. It is often the very reason that centralized architecture is adopted.

Security in decentralized systems is very difficult. It has to be built into the architecture to be effective, and cannot be an afterthought to the design. Part of the appeal of P2P has been the lack of control, along with the freedom and anonymity that exists in P2P systems. However, this is not viable in commercial applications dealing with private information or monetary exchanges. These applications require traditional security assurances, regardless of the underlying architectural design.

Fortunately, Java has much to offer when building systems with strong security requirements. In addition, there are now commercial P2P applications that provide examples demonstrating encryption, public and private key usage, and the establishment of trust relationships over an untrusted network.

The next obstacle that will need to be overcome is the current lack of standards. For P2P to become viable as a foundation for building distributed systems, standards will be required. Standardization in any technology is difficult to achieve, especially with new technologies that have yet to mature.

There is promise in this area with Project JXTA and the widespread adoption of XML. P2P and Web services appear to be converging on XML messaging. Despite fundamental differences in architecture, with Web services biased toward client/server models and P2P biased toward decentralized models, many opportunities still exist to integrate and complement each architectural approach. As has been highlighted, many times mixed models are needed to adequately address application and system-specific requirements.

Another fundamental problem is with the transient nature of edge resources sometimes they are available, and sometimes not. Reliability, bandwidth, and location are subject to change. Therefore, P2P applications must be able to accommodate these properties of edge resources.

Of course, to become widely adopted by businesses and corporations, P2P will have to offer transactions. Digital commerce requires some form of monetary exchange. Much of the press on P2P has perhaps made this more of a perception obstacle than a technical one, but it exists nonetheless. Transactions are difficult in distributed environments, and will require the other two key obstacles to be overcome security and lack of standards.



JavaT P2P Unleashed
JavaT P2P Unleashed
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2002
Pages: 209

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