provided by: 
Originally published at Internet.comRecently, Sun Microsystems released JXTA (pronounced juxta) as a platform for P2P applications. The project is an open-source effort accessible from jxta.org. In this article, we focus on the architecture and technologies that make up JXTA. "When you consider a typical P2P application, you can see that JXTA has attempted to provide an architecture that matches the most common requirements."
The application platform in many ways reflect on the requirements of the architecture. For example, Client/Server requires the client to do a lot of work, and so it led to creation of "fat" clients. Consider for a moment, your favorite P2P application. Such applications are composed of a number of distinct nodes (peers) running on different physical machines. Given a collection of such peers, what are some of the things you need to create applications? Obviously you will need communication among peers. Such communication cannot be random, so you need a way to uniquely identify each peer. The collection is not static as peers will join and abandon the network, so there is a need to dynamically determine (discover) other peers. The few points mentioned above make up the foundation of peer-to-peer platforms.
JXTA is an attempt to create a framework by providing the capabilities that most P2P applications require...
Read article at Internet.com site