Moving Forward with Mindshare
Mindshare stuff is now over here.
Currently the test GUI is available and not much else. I went with Swing/AWT for
the GUI because of my familiarity with it and my frustration with the lack of
documentation for SWT. If SWT gets its act
together I would defiantly jump ship, fast native, cross platform GUI’s are
where its at.
So next on the agenda for Mindshare is to get it on the
Jxta network. Jxta doesn’t have a peer ‘auto
configure’ system yet. Most P2P software can detect the resources and network
type on the node and configure itself accordingly. Since auto configure is on
the short list of features for the next version of Jxta I’m not going to
implement that. The Mindshare alpha will come with a generic well connected node
profile and you’ll have to mess with the settings on your own, in a text file,
to change your configuration. When auto configure becomes available in the
spring ill upgrade to that version of Jxta.
The first network test will be a group chat program built into the existing
GUI. This spike will prove several things:
- Peers can bootstrap themselves on the network from a configuration file.
- Peers can find a peer group they ‘want’ to join or create it if it cant be
found. - Peers can open pipes to one another.
- Peers can send XML encoded messages inside the Jxta message envelope.
- Peers can decode messages received in XML format.
- Peers can sense the ‘presence’ of other peers.
Look for an alpha test announcement sometime before the new year. Ill send
e-mail to all those that have expressed interest in helping with alpha testing.
Its been a rough few weeks here but now I’m getting psyched about the project
again.
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