The Two-Way Web An Interoperable Foundation for P2P Rohit Khare CEO, KnowNow Inc. 14 February 2001 OReilly P2P Conference

14 February 2001The Two-Way Web for P2P2 Introduction zWhat infrastructure services do we need to build great P2P applications? zCan todays One-Way Web infrastructure provide all of those services? zCan tomorrows Two-Way Web overcome perceived limitations and support compelling peer-to-peer applications?

14 February 2001The Two-Way Web for P2P3 P2P Foundation Services zTransport yOf XML and SOAP, messages, in particular zSecurity yUsing SSL/TLS and some flavor of PKI zTransfer yOf instant messages and multimedia files zNamespaces yRequires fully decentralized management

14 February 2001The Two-Way Web for P2P4 The P2P Standards Race zEntrantCynics View * zNapsterOpen zGnutellaChatty zGrooveClosed zInvisible WorldsRocket Science zWeb BrowserUgly & Buggy z * These are all unfair caricatures, to be sure!

14 February 2001The Two-Way Web for P2P5 Why reuse the Web? 1/2 zTransport yHTTP is the most widely supported application layer protocol on the Internet ySOAP bindings already exist zSecurity yWeb security standards have proven sufficient for multi-billion dollar industries yIntegration & Management are the true challenges; Web infrastructure already exists

14 February 2001The Two-Way Web for P2P6 Why reuse the Web?2/2 zTransfer yAlmost every P2P service already standardized on HTTP for file transfer yByte-ranges allow restart of interrupted xfers yChunked-encoding allows streaming data zNamespaces yURIs extend the domain naming system to all ySame social foundation as XML Namespaces

14 February 2001The Two-Way Web for P2P7 Benefits of reusing the Web zCaching yHTTP/1.1 has robust caching semantics zFormat Negotiation yAllows both parties to choose media types zProxying yClearly demarcates security & trust boundary zEvolution yLeverage continuing work on WebDAV, XP,…

14 February 2001The Two-Way Web for P2P8 Costs of reusing the Web zUser Interface yThe submit and refresh buttons suck yApplets and Flash are too low-level yFull-scale downloads severely inhibit adoption & inflate total costs of ownership zFirewalls yVast majority of end-users cannot accept inbound IP traffic, on port 80 or otherwise

14 February 2001The Two-Way Web for P2P9 Perceived Limitations zThe One-Way Web isnt enough! zTodays HTTP tools are fundamentally crippled for peer-to-peer applications: yOne-Way xTheres no asynchronous callback-channel yOne-to-One xCant multicast a query to nearest neighbors yOne-Shot xEntire transaction fails if a single server fails

14 February 2001The Two-Way Web for P2P10 Two-Way Web solutions zThese are only limitations of the tools… zUsing HTTP in both directions * makes it: yTwo-Way xWe can POST back to a microserver on any device yAny-to-Any xA smart proxy can become the client of several other web services without modification yReliable xA queuing proxy can even operate offline z * This is also known as Distributed HTTP per Udell.

14 February 2001The Two-Way Web for P2P11 KnowNows Two-Way Web zWere building a new generation of commercial Layer 7 Routers yInterconnecting Web services in real-time across HTTP, WAP, SMTP, FTP, IMAP,… zWere building a new class of Real-time Web applications yeBay takes longer to reload a page than an entire multi-million dollar bond auction

14 February 2001The Two-Way Web for P2P12 Why We Bet on the Web Zero-Instal l Works with any 4.x+ Web browser (Over 90% share) Works with any HTTP/1.1 Web server, esp. Apache (Over 60% share) Web Developer Community Leverages skills with current scripting languages and design tools Enterprise Apps are Web Apps Leverages current investments in Web/XML adaptors Minimizes Integration Costs Leverages existing solutions for Web security, caching, firewalls...

14 February 2001The Two-Way Web for P2P13 The Future of Internet Application Development zWho else is betting on SOAP Services? zMicrosoft.NET zSun ONE zHP E-Speak zIBM WebSphere zW3Cs XML Protocol WG zGartner Group predicts that 75% of distributed enterprise application development will use XML messaging by 2004 zReal-time peer-to-peer XML message-passing is a fundamental architectural style for Internet-scale apps

14 February 2001The Two-Way Web for P2P14 Event Notification isnt at Internet-Scale… yet zKnowNow comes upon the heels of 20 years research in event-based integration zPublish-and-Subscribe is already the basis of a $50 Billion software segment zBut no current event bus works as well outside the Enterprise LAN firewall zThe next e-business challenge is Leveraging resources you cant own

14 February 2001The Two-Way Web for P2P15 For More Information… +1 (650) zKnowNow, Inc Sand Hill Road Suite 150 Menlo Park, California zWere Hiring! y(heck, even Fred Sánchez!)