These days, it’s increasingly rare to begin a new Java project without looking at one or more pre-existing frameworks, collections of class libraries that provide the underlying structure for an application and enforce good programming practices. There are frameworks for enterprise computing (EJB), Web applications (Struts), business process modeling (Naked Objects), graphical user interfaces (JFace), and many other areas of development. A well-designed framework provides a sturdy structure upon which to build applications.
These days, it’s increasingly rare to begin a new Java project without looking at one or more pre-existing frameworks, collections of class libraries that provide the underlying structure for an application and enforce good programming practices. There are frameworks for enterprise computing (EJB), Web applications (Struts), business process modeling (Naked Objects), graphical user interfaces (JFace), and many other areas of development. A well-designed framework provides a sturdy structure upon which to build applications.
However, frameworks are a trade-off: you get reliability and speed of development, yet often give up flexibility and the joy of inventing something hands-on. But, ultimately, there’s an overwhelming benefit: a framework captures the gobs of brainpower that its developers applied to the problem.
The JXTA framework, an open source project sparked by Bill Joy and Mike Clary of Sun Microsystems, tackles one of the hardest challenges in current programming: the development of peer-to-peer software (P2P). JXTA is a set of XML protocols that provide the building blocks necessary to support peer-to-peer networking services, such as the formation of decentralized networks, presence detection, message exchange, and security.
Because of the project’s name and its origins at Sun, many developers have the perception that JXTA is a Java project. That’s not entirely the case: Java is used for the reference implementation of the protocols, but JXTA — named after the word “juxtapose” — is intended to be language independent. There are fledgling projects afoot to support JXTA with C, Perl, Python, Ruby, and SmallTalk.
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