Chapter 17. The JXTA Shell
| by Frank Sommers In This Chapter
At the 2001 O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer Conference, Bill Joy, Sun Microsystems' co-founder and chief technologist, introduced JXTA with a comparison to the Unix operating system. In the early days of Unix, when Joy was a student at the University of California at Berkeley, many versions of that operating system were in use. In addition, crucial parts of Unix, such as the filesystem, had a variety of implementations. Although that diversity fueled Unix innovation, it resulted in many incompatible software packages all trying to solve similar problems. The peer-to-peer space, Joy argued, exhibits a similar situation: File sharing, peer-to-peer communication, security, and peer groups are issues all P2P systems must deal with. Chapter 16, "JXTA and XML," gives you a glimpse of how JXTA abstracts out those common functionalities into a set of reusable APIs, much like the Berkeley version of Unix (BSD) aimed to provide a common platform for all to build on. Unix's design inspired JXTA in other ways, too. This chapter will show you a JXTA application, the JXTA Shell, that takes many useful concepts from the Unix shells and extends those capabilities to P2P networks. |
