The P2P Dashboard

The P2P Dashboard sample program demonstrates techniques to create communities of peers and groups, and to detect peer presence individually (locally) or within groups (remotely). This program also illustrates the concepts of monitoring and configuration of shared space.

The P2P Dashboard utilizes the following JXTA protocols:

• Peer Membership Protocol

• Peer Discovery Protocol

Community Formation

The P2P Dashboard program provides the capability to create communities by adding new peers and new groups. Peers form groups, and groups form communities. Individual peers can join multiple groups that represent separate communities. You can maintain separate communities by removing peers locally and/or from different groups remotely.

In the P2P Dashboard program, you can add peers or remove them with the exception of the default peer at any time after creation. You can add or remove groups with the exception of the default group in the same manner. You can add peers to one or more groups, and remove peers from one or more groups at any time.

Presence

Discovery services (local and remote) keep peer and group advertisements updated. All advertisements are kept in a local cache for quick lookups. If an advertisement for a peer or group is not found locally, then a remote discovery activity needs to occur to find a given peer and/or group.

The P2P Dashboard provides a mechanism with which you can discover the presence of a peer locally within the group of peers, or remotely in one or more groups.

Monitoring

Monitoring is dependent on the type of peer architecture used. Decentralized, brokered, and centralized architectures utilize various aspects of the concepts of publish-subscribe and point-to-point messaging. Monitoring of shared memory or objects is useful to many peers and/or groups that might depend on such shared resources for information, such as virtual blackboard/scoreboards and shared files.

The P2P Dashboard program provides the capability to monitor local and remote peers. Users can view the current list of local and/or remote peers that have locally cached advertisements. The Dashboard provides widgets, such as a discovery button and local/remote radio buttons, to execute the corresponding peer discovery activity.