Sun unveils secret weapon Part II
Published: 16 Feb 2001 09:56 GMT
Sun no doubt hopes Jxta will be more successful than its predecessors -- two other Joy brainchildren, Java and Jini -- in luring the help of the open-source movement.
Well after Java and Jini were created, Sun tried to attract the attention of the open-source community by retrofitting the tools with half-shared, half-proprietary software licenses. But it's not easy to harness the energy of open-source programmers. "We're not unaware that trying to build these communities and getting people to work together is harder than writing code or even starting a business," Joy said.
Java, unveiled in 1994, was Sun's first attempt to bypass Microsoft. Java's promise, only partly fulfilled seven years later, is to let programs run on any type of computer -- Windows, Linux or anything else with the proper Java foundation.
Jini, announced in 1999, was designed as a way to get gadgets such as digital cameras and printers to communicate without requiring computers to act as an intermediary. Despite Sun's promises, though, Jini has largely been a commercial flop.
Joy said Jxta will run well on Java-enabled devices, but won't require Java as a foundation. Here again, Sun appears to be learning from its mistakes: The company is working on a revised version of Jini that also doesn't require Java.
Sun's project may be the most ambitious effort yet to bring together a young peer-to-peer world that is quickly fragmenting into dozens of different networks. Although many of these discrete services operate perfectly well on their own -- Napster being the most successful -- peer-to-peer developers and investors are increasingly calling for some kind of bridge. "The risk we face is a maze of balkanised networks," Clay Shirky, a partner at venture capital firm Accelerated Ventures, said in a keynote speech at the O'Reilly conference Wednesday. "We need to talk about interoperability."
This goal, in many of the most ambitious peer-to-peer developers' minds, would be to allow the Net to move a stage beyond today's Internet, which consists largely of tapping into simple text, video or audio services on a Web site or basic services such as e-commerce.
These developers are dreaming of a much more complex network, in which individual computers, wireless phones, powerful servers and databases all work together to offer new kinds of Web services, whether they are software services offered remotely or interactive sharing programs like Napster and Gnutella.
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