Re: [architecture] Project proposal from Tarragona University (Spain)

[Dominique De Vito <dominique.devito@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Miguel,

During the last OW architecture meeting (4-6 April 2005), we have had an 
interesting presentation from BULL about edge servers on top of JOnAS :

=> JOnAS for Edge Computing. This presentation lists different use cases 
of JOnAS for Edge Computing. It then focuses on the JOnAS requirements 
for this technology and finally we present some followed tracks to reach 
those requirements 
(http://www.objectweb.org/wws/d_read/marketing/public/ArchitectureMeetingsAgendas/OW_Architecture_Meeting_April05.pdf)

During the discussion, I have advocated to use P2P as an alternative for 
broadcasting between JOnAS servers.

And, now, I just see our email. Ideas are in the air...

Well, let's add first some words about my P2P interest.

In a session during last JavaOne 2004, SUN said: the P2P JXTA enables to 
build easily dynamic communities over HTTP.

Hum, hum, I said. OK, but you are bypassing the firewalls. What about 
security ?

SUN replies: Well, security is taken into account into JXTA, one can 
include certificates into P2P messages. Then, firewalls can check 
security through certificates (note that this is then a new kind of 
firewall, and more semantic/community-based, than syntaxic/protocol-based).

At the end, I thought it was an interesting stuff, full of new 
possibilities, and that SUN engineers were thinking about the different 
aspects (including security) to do something doable.

It was in June, last year.

This year, following the same path, I have not been very surprised to 
see Microsoft buying Groove in order to acquire Groove Virtual Office, a 
community-based, P2P tool (see 
<http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5608063.html> and 
<http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5660149.html>).

The world goes more into P2P direction (think about communities and 
ecosystems, like OSS ones).

See also the Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF) : 
http://www.eclipse.org/ecf/

This being said, at first sight, I think the project described in our 
document is quite in line with grid computing discussions we have had 
during the last OW archi meeting. And this approach looks as a candidate 
way for different classes of applications:
* full static content
* dynamic content (first, without database move, and after, with 
database move).
* media application, streaming (remember, during OW meeting, the BULL 
presenter was taking about MDB (Media EJB Beans) on top of the J2EE server)
* bank (for deployment)
* administration (large scale file/document transfer mechanism)

Let's enter into more details.

Page 5. The last paragraph reminded me GemStone technology. GemStone was 
provided very few years ago a J2EE server and they were able to push 
JVMs down or up according to various parameters. For example, they had 
established relationships between memory usage and JVM performance. So, 
according to memory usage, they pushed JVMs down or up. Interesting 
possibilities.

Page 6. The first paragraph pushs me to question the P2P protocol 
mentionned in the paper. Is it Java independant ?

Page 6. How one can assert that P2P communications will happen only on 
server-side, and not between clients and servers ?

Page 8. The DeskShot application mentionned in the paper is close to 
Groove's Virtual Office application that Microsoft bought (see above). I 
will be happy the appearance of such application in OSS world.

Page 9. While thinking about connection with ObjectWeb softwares, you 
might be interested by CAROL layer as it is a way to abstract 
communication and to replace one communication implementation by another 
one.

My 2 cents.

Any other opinion/point of view ?

Dominique





Miguel Valdes a écrit :

> Hi all,
>  
> I just received a project proposal from the Rovira i Virgili 
> University (Spain) which want to integrate the
> ObjectWeb Consortium. I would like to know your impressions about it:
>  
> "SNAP (Structured overlay Networks Application Platform). SNAP is a 
> J2EE web application deployment
> and management infrastructure for structured overlay networks. By 
> using SNAP, developers can easily
> deploy any kind of J2EE web application onto a worldwide structured 
> peer-to-peer network."
>  
> I attached a white paper with more information about the project. The 
> paper also includes a chapter called
> "Connection with the ObjectWeb Consortium".
>  
> Miguel
>  
>  
>  
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>