Sun working on peer-to-peer software

SAN FRANCISCO - Sun last week said it's developing a software platform for peer-to-peer computing it hopes will provide a common base for writing distributed applications.

Speaking at the O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer Conference, Sun Chief Scientist Bill Joy said the platform, called Juxtapose, will be an addition to Sun's family of Web-based programming languages, which includes Java and Jini.

"We wanted to see if we could take some of these ideas and come up with a common core we could imagine using for some of the peer-to-peer projects we want to work on at Sun," Joy said.

Sun's goal is to provide an initial, simple code layer that will let other vendors build applications for peer-to-peer computing that interoperate with each other, he said.

A team of developers at Sun has been working on Juxtapose, or "Juxta" as Joy called it, for six months to a year. In April, the company will host an online conference for software developers where it will release the Juxta specification and try to generate interest in the technology.

Interested users can write to Sun at jxta@sun.com to sign up for the April session.

He emphasized that finishing a security layer in Juxta early should help this peer-to-peer computing platform avoid hurdles that others might encounter over the course of their evolution. In addition to security, Juxta should contain some monitoring features to examine user activity, seeing what elements of peer-to-peer users like and don't like.

Open-source collaboration company CollabNet will host some of the Juxta code, as it does with Sun's StarOffice productivity applications.

Vance is a correspondent with the IDG News Service in San Francisco.

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