Sun takes aim at Microsoft's .Net project with 'Jxta'

Sun Microsystems unveiled Thursday a project designed to undermine Microsoft's power and make its own software the centre of one of the Net's most dynamic new movements.

The software, called Jxta (pronounced "juxta") is Sun's contribution to the much-hyped "peer-to-peer" technology made famous by file-swapping programs such as Napster.

Bill Joy, Sun's chief scientist, announced the Jxta software project Thursday at the O'Reilly Peer to Peer conference in San Francisco, exhorting outside programmers to help standardise Jxta as the basic plumbing for building new peer-to-peer applications.

The project is a direct threat to .Net, Microsoft's effort to make its Windows operating system the future foundation of the Internet. Jxta is the latest in a long line of Sun projects designed to reduce operating systems such as Windows to mere cogs while people write software that works at a higher level.

Sun hopes to enlist one of Microsoft's worst foes, the open-source community, in the Jxta effort. Jxta will be open-source software, meaning that anyone can modify and redistribute the software without restriction. The open-source community has challenged not just Microsoft but also Sun with successes such as the Linux operating system and the Apache Web server.

What's in it for Sun is a peer-to-peer infrastructure on which higher-level commercial applications can operate, Joy said. "We have some distributed applications we'd like to run," he said.

Jxta will include standards for how devices in a peer-to-peer network identify themselves and are grouped together, Joy said. It also will include a security mechanism to ensure that distributed programs don't harm the device they're running on, Joy said, in contrast to the email viruses that afflict networked Windows systems.

Mike Clary, head of the Jxta project, said the software will include ways that computing tasks can be linked together in "pipelines" that span a peer-to-peer network. In addition, Jxta will offer a mechanism by which tasks can be monitored and controlled.

Jxta fits into Sun's vision of the future of the Internet, called Sun One. "This will probably be part of the Sun One platform, but will probably be one of the simplest pieces," Joy said. "We're not turning this into something that's infinitely complicated like (Microsoft's) .Net."

The new project walks a fine line between attempting to control the burgeoning peer-to-peer technology world and leaving it open to the whims of smaller developers. Joy disclaimed any desire to control the new market. Jxta is meant simply as a lingua franca that will let separate peer-to-peer applications work in concert with one other, he said.

"We don't want to have a standards body," Joy said. "We are not here trying to get everyone to license this like we're doing with Java. We don't necessarily even want to be the centre of this."

Nevertheless, the first release of Jxta -- due out in April on the CollabNet site, Joy said -- will be code-written under the direction of Sun and Joy's team. And it's not easy to foresee any other company or set of developers taking the same kind of role, even in an ostensibly open source project, that a company with the market power of Sun has.

Jxta already has some competition as a unified effort. Intel has sponsored a peer-to-peer working group that is already aiming at creating standards for peer-to-peer applications. Although the effort initially proved controversial, the group has already begun work.

Part 2 to follow.

Fallout from the Napster saga is making life mighty difficult for peer-to-peer companies to break the ice in Corporate America. Charles Cooper says the paradox is that Napster isn't even a pure P2P play, although it continues to serve as the poster child for what's considered to be a renegade technology. Go to AnchorDesk UK for the news comment.

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