What is JXTA and what is its relation to Beacon?
JXTA is Sun Microsystems’s peer to peer development and runtime platform. JXTA applications are described squarely in terms of publishing and discovering application advertisements of interest on its network. A JXTA advertisement is an XML document typically describing something a peer wants or something a peer has to offer. JXTA is a powerful platform for developing peer to peer applications. Its power results in some sense from freedom from having to code central servers to parse protocol messages for every new application written. JXTA peers route advertisements for each other, but do not interpret these advertisements for each other. Peers at the edge are responsible for querying the network for advertisements and interpreting their significance. Beacon is written on top of JXTA, and is therefore a JXTA application.
