communities
by bear
Yesterday was one of those days for me that reinforced an idea, actually more of a realization, that I’ve had stewing for a while. This idea probably isn’t world shattering and heck, it’s probably something that many people grok. Basically the Internet really isn’t a single thing but rather it is a collection of worlds with each world having a distinct population and flavour. Even the word “world” isn’t really apt as I think that each sphere/world/community has overlap with others and you can move between them easily. Anywho, the event that sparked the above was finding (via the “OSAF Wi ki":http://wiki.osafoundation.org/twiki/bin/view/Journal/LisaDusseaultNotes200 40406z entry by Lisa) the JXTA project - a collection of protocols to allow peer to peer communcation written in Java. Very cool stuff going on and when I downloaded the sample app to try it worked :) Evidently they have abstracted the yucky stuff by using the “Apache APR":http://apr.apache.org/ to hide the network layer and by choosing XML to implement the wire protocol.