SAN FRANCISCO -- Bill Joy, Sun Microsystems' co-founder and chief scientist, gets paid to think the tech world's Big Thoughts -- and when he speaks at conferences, his far-out notions are sometimes a bit hard to grasp.
That's part of being a tech grandee, perhaps: You come out with ideas that most people only sorta-kinda understand, and if you present them many times with enough specific demos of what they can do, perhaps you can shape the future.
Joy's next big thing is JXTA (pronounced "juxta"), which is Sun's foray into peer-to-peer world. At a keynote on Wednesday at JavaOne, the Java programming language conference occurring here this week, Joy and other Sun execs again preached their JXTA plan, and the audience was just a wee-bit wowed.
As he's been doing for a few months now -- when he talks to peer-to-peer and open-source loving conferences -- on Wednesday Joy again described JXTA: It's a "core architecture" written in the cross-platform Java language that allows developers to easily build distributed applications.
These distributed applications rely on a new model of the network in which connected computers communicate directly with each other -- instead of going through a central server for communication, which is the current model.
Peer-to-peer music-trading applications like Napster and Gnutella have received the most attention, but there are potentially hundreds of uses for the technology, and Sun's JXTA aims to facilitate the development of those programs, Joy said.
"We saw that everyone was building these separate applications by themselves," he said. "We thought that if you wanted a secure peer-to-peer application, you shouldn't have to build all that initial stuff all over again."
So JXTA is that initial stuff, and -- since it's an open-source project -- the thing is freely available for all developers to build their own potential P2P programs. Thanks to JXTA, the Sun execs said, we'll soon be seeing hordes of peer-to-peer Java programs available on the Web.
But what's all this P2P going to bring us? Just more versions of Napster?
That's what Joy was really here for -- to translate the big ideas into showy demos that get the coders clapping.
Joy first showed a cool new JXTA app from a start-up called eMikolo. The program is called the PeerSwitch, and in the drab parlance of networking, it "turns clients into routers."
Basically, this means that people running this program will give others access to content they've downloaded from the Web, so that if you want to get something specific -- a large movie file, say -- your computer can get it from someone else running PeerSwitch instead of from the central server.
This reduces bottlenecks on the Internet, which today becomes crippled when many people try to get the same content at the same time. The "Slashdot effect" -- so named because once a site is posted on Slashdot it gets enough hits to cause it to go down -- would be history if everyone used eMikolo's program.
"Oddly enough," said Greg Papadopoulous, Sun's chief technology officer, "the more people who go to a site, easier that site is to get (using eMikolo)."
But making the Web much faster is just the beginning -- indeed, the Web isn't really where JXTA will make its biggest impact, if we believe that Java will make its biggest splash in the wireless world.
If every device from cell phones to PDAs to cars to Playstations runs Java -- which is Sun's hope -- then all those devices, thanks to JXTA, will be able to talk to each other directly.
So say you're driving down the street and want to find a close gas station with great prices. If you have a Java cell phone, you can run a JXTA-based, peer-to-peer auction in which near gas stations automatically bid for your business.
Joy ran a demo of this type of app on a PDA, and people clapped, thinking it was kind of cool. Then a Sun exec said, "Since this is peer to peer, you could automatically join together with cars near you and arrange a volume purchase, getting a better price."
People liked that idea: Java combined with JXTA combined with a PDA and a car. Suddenly, we can beat the gas companies.
The coders broke out into pretty appreciative applause, and it was clear that Joy's big ideas had got through.
