Sun's Bill Joy At Work On P2P Project

Sun Microsystems has a peer-to-peer effort under way focused on delivering next-generation applications functionality that takes advantage of open-source development.

The effort also takes advantage of Sun technologies such as Java and Jini, and industry standards such as XML.

Bill Joy, Sun's co-founder and chief technologist, unveiled the project, known as Juxtapose or just plain Jxta for short, at the O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer conference here Thursday. Joy said Jxta is his "incubation project," which Sun has been working on for "about six months to a year, finishing some code to implement the concepts of the goals we had."

Some of those goals include "coming up with a set of primitives to do applications on a P2P environment" and being able to "pipe from one peer to another," said Mike Clary, who manages the project and who joined Joy in announcing the project. Other key aspects for the initial phases of the project include developing monitoring and metering capabilities, enabling users to set up peer-to-peer groups in ways they see fit, and adding security into the fabric of the architecture, according to the executives.

Without being specific, Joy indicated Sun's goals are not totally altruistic. "Our goal is we have some particular distributed applications we have to build and to build them we need some of the stuff in Jxta to succeed."

Despite Joy's many accomplishments in the computer industry, he said he is not looking for personal acclaim for this effort. Joy said he hopes to pursue an open-source model in developing this P2P environment, something akin to the Apache model.

"We don't want to have a standards body, we don't want to rule the world, and we don't want everybody to license this like we did with Java," he said. "We want to work with others and we want to open it op. We want to use an open-source model like Apache. The Apache model is like the BSD model [Berkeley Systems Division, which Joy helped create], which I did 20 years ago."

To get to the community level he foresees, Joy said Sun will hold an online conference for all developers interested in getting involved in the effort. Sun didn't reveal a specific date and time, but interested parties should send email to: jxta@sun.com.

"We're not unaware that trying to build the communities and trying to get people to work together is harder than writing code," Joy said.

Joy said he has little doubt that "innovation in this space is going to occur in lots and lots of small groups. We're very interested in this P2P space and we hope to work with many of you."

Taking a stab at Microsoft's Web services strategy, Joy said: "We're not trying to do something that's infinitely complicated like .Net."

John Rymer, president and founder of Upstream Consulting, an Emeryville, Calif.-based IT business consulting firm, said Joy may be doing just that with Jxta.

Rymer said that while he has no doubt Joy can deliver a successful technology, he is not sure if Jxta will drive greater adoption of P2P in the industry beyond simple file sharing because there is no viable business model for it.

"Bill Joy is a phenomenal visionary and the one thing about him is he's consistent, but he is not a guy that is clear about creating business on top of technology," said Rymer.

Rymer said that for P2P to become a viable model for the industry, it must overcome technological complexities and myriad legal issues.

"I think that the enthusiasm for peer-to-peer is way out of line for what the real potential is," says Rymer. "People look at Napster and say, '50 million people are sharing files--we can transfer this to the business world.' But it doesn't transfer all that well to the business world."

In a panel following Joy's presentation, David Stutz, a Microsoft software architect, said that much of what Sun has been doing is nothing new.

"Jini made a lot of hay by revisiting existing ideas. These techniques have been around a long, long time," he said. "We tend to think the same thing over and over again." He added though, that one thing he sees in common, "besides the fact that you all run on Windows, is that there's a great need for connectivity and for awareness."

Stutz said he believes users ought to be able to be aware of the status of the network. "Where you can monitor the state of the Net and of other areas out on the Net, those are areas we can move forward with instead of restating old ideas."