JXTA-Based Educational Collaborative System

The popularity of file sharing systems such as Napster and Gnutella have given enormous attention to the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology. P2P system combines resource contributions from individual peers into a large shared-by-all pool of resources. Every peer of the system acts as both client and server and provides part of the overall information available from the system. The emphasis on sharing resources, self-organization and use of discovery mechanisms sets the P2P systems apart from other forms of distributed computing.JXTA is an open network-computing platform designed for P2P computing, consisting of standard protocols, programming tools and multilanguage implementations. JXTA defines protocols for discovery, messaging, identification, group organization, etc., which are necessary for all P2P applications. JXTA aims to leverage and build upon the traditional communication protocols, such as TCP and HTTP, and to provide universal components for building P2P applications. JXTA offers generic building blocks and services to enable innovative applications for peer groups. JXTA provides services to let peers find each other in the group, and exchange messages across firewalls and NATs (Network Address Translators).This thesis presents JXTA-Based Educational Collaborative System (JxECS), an application we have built using the JXTA P2P framework. It is low cost, rich researcher reference and high security system designed to run in a university network. It provides a place that allows students within any educational institution to exchange their ideas, problems and experience through group chatting tool, as well as to share their documents (i.e. research papers, articles and e-books etc.) by using a secure file sharing tool. To ensure the quality of resources on the university network and to prevent unauthentic files, JxECS will require users to authenticate to central Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers upon upload of files.A complete prototype has been developed and demonstrated in this thesis. The screen shot of almost every important user interface has been given and illustrated.