JXTA in a Nutshell

Chapter 1. Introduction to JXTA

You’re driving home at night; it’s late and you’re hungry. Imagine that your car has a device that automatically locates nearby restaurants and tells you which of them has the food you want at the best price. Better yet — what if you could contact nearby drivers, see if any of them also want to stop for food, and spontaneously form a group that negotiates with a nearby restaurant for a volume discount?

While you’re waiting in the restaurant, you run into an old business acquaintance; in a brief discussion, you realize that she is working on a project that could provide a key feature for your own work. You could exchange business cards with her, of course, but why not immediately exchange the specifications of your projects instead?

And speaking of your office: you’ve still got to stop by the new print shop and pick up the slides for tomorrow’s meeting. What if your desktop computer could find a new print shop that provides full color transparency printing services in just one hour?

These types of services have long been envisioned in an increasingly mobile and “connected” population. To a certain extent, many of them are possible today, especially if you have access to a centralized server or the other participants. JXTA will help us to expand such applications.

What Is JXTA?

JXTA is a collaborative research project for peer-to-peer (P2P) computing. “Project JXTA” (or, more simply, JXTA) stands for Project Juxtapose; it is an acknowledgment that ...