Title: Smoke: An Infrastructure supporting Distributed Peer Services
Length: 60 minutes
Focus of Talk: Technical/Tutorial
Subject Matter: Infrastructure/Distributed Computation
Abstract
The sale of large scale control systems — such as those used with mass transit systems or to control multi-national pipelines — often requires a marketing and engineering effort that demands the input of several different people, many of whom live in different countries and speak different languages. To assist in this effort, a project is underway to create an automatic configuration tool that allows these team members to work in a collaborative manner, regardless of each member’s locale.
Because of a lack of infrastructure for applications of this nature, the developers designed one that is based entirely within P2P-based concepts and technologies.
This infrastructure, named Smoke, is unique in that it’s based on the concept of shared distributed peer services — services that are lightweight, discrete, and transient — existing within a framework that is both open-application and cross-platform compatible.
At the presentation, the speaker will provide an overview of Smoke, as well as demonstrate a working prototype of the automatic configuration tool. To display Smoke’s open-application and cross-platform support, three variations of the configuration tool prototype will be demonstrated: one with an interface created with Mozilla’s XUL and hosted on MacOS; one accessed through Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) hosted through an Apache WebServer and WebLogic on Unix; and one accessed through Groove, another P2P infrastructure product, hosted in Windows 2000.
Smoke is an open source infrastructure, which means it can be used by any developer interested in working within a P2P distributed peer services environment.
Description:
Shelley Powers will present an open source P2P infrastructure that supports the concept of distributed peer services: services that are lightweight, discrete, and transient. A prototype large scale control system configuration tool is used to demonstrate the infrastructure. Three different variations of the prototype will be shown, to demonstrate both the open-application and cross-platform capability of the infrastructure and the tool.
Speaker: Shelley Powers
Speaker Biography:
Shelley Powers is a consultant/author with her own company, the Burning Bird Corporation, currently located in Boston, Massachusetts.
In the last several years, Shelley has worked on several distributed and Web-based applications on a variety of platforms. In addition, she has also authored or co-authored books on Dynamic HTML, JavaScript, Java, CGI, Perl, P2P, and other technologies, as well as writing for several publications including Webtechniques, MSDN Journal, Netscapeworld, and O’Reilly Network. She’s the author of O’Reilly’s Developing ASP Components, second edition. Shelley can be reached at shelleyp@yasd.com.