First Glorious Screencast!

I could be wrong, but this is probably the only JRUBY + JXTA screencast out there. Perhaps the only JXTA screencast?

Using Wink, a free screen capture tool for Linux or Windows, I threw together a quick demo of where I'm headed in terms of of developing a JRuby abstraction layer of insulating developers from the gory details of JXTA. Nothing fancy, I basically set some environment variables, fire up jirb and create a new JXTA peergroup in about two lines of ruby.

And the best thing is you don't get to hear my grumpy, allergy-laden voice!

Setting up a PeerTAB Dev Environment

I created wiki page details the following steps necessary to set up your own peertab development environment, including:

• OS Installation (I used Debian Etch but it doesn't matter) and additional packages
  
• JRE/JDK (again I'm using the Java 5 packages
• Retrieving the source tree via subversion
• Installing JRuby
• Installing JXTA
• Running a simple hello world script I wrote several months ago
• Configuring fprobe and flow-tools (NetFlow will be the first EventSource) to be added to the network
  

Why JXTA? Updated JXTA Developer Documentation!

Back in May I started looking at what Open Source P2P APIs were available. P2PS looked promising (and even still under active development) since JXTA is probably overkill for this project, but there simply wasn't a critical mass of developers/developmentr compared to what was available for JXTA. As a result there weren't enough sample apps to look or solid programmer documentation. Free Pastry was also a possibility and had more sample apps, but didn't have a rich set of security functionality. Of course if the toolset is designed correctly, it should be easy to swap in different P2P APIs (for example, if the JXTA Ruby bindings become mature enough if we want to deploy embedded nodes that don't require Java)

I was pleasantly surprised when I visited JXSE Java.net Page today (JXSE is simply the Java SE/EE implementation, as opposed to CLDC/J2ME) I was pleased to see that a new version of the programmers guide was only released a couple of weeks ago. This is good news. JXSE is currently at verison 2.5_rc3 so given the early state we are at it makes sense to go with this.