Peer-to-Peer

Distributed object technologies like RMI, CORBA, DCOM, and SOAP assume a client\server architecture.
That is, applications written for them usually assume:
- Servers are well-known, always available, faster.
- Clients only want to communicate with servers.
- Clients are slower, less powerful, more likely to be residing in a workstation.
P2P applications such as distributed.net and the many file-sharing systems have shown that this is not enough.
JXTA ("juxta") was designed to enable the implementation of sophisticated P2P application. That is, beyond file-sharing.
It was started as a SUN project, headed by Bill Joy, but then became open source. You can learn more by visiting the JXTA homepage.