SNAP: Structured overlay Networks Application Platform

Friday, 30 June 2006: SNAP 1.0 RC and Jounin 1.0 released.
SNAP's new version and Jounin's initial version released. Moreover, a set of new applications for SNAP and Jounin are added in the Download section.

Monday, 06 March 2006: SNAP 0.5 released.
SNAP's new version is released, it includes p2pWeb services features and major bug fixing. Installer distribution version added.

Saturday, 01 October 2005: SNAP release split
Documentation and release notes available at the Documentation section. SNAP's distribution has divided into the binary release and the source code release.

Saturday, 17 September 2005: SNAP 0.1 released
SNAP's first version is released. Documentation and release notes will be available soon. Meanwhile, you may take a look at the readme.txt file.

Wednesday, 31 August 2005: New ObjectWeb hosting for SNAP
SNAP has become an ObjectWeb Consortium project.

Overview

SNAP is a J2EE web application deployment and management infrastructure for structured peer-to-peer overlay networks (the so-called DHTs). By using SNAP, developers can easily deploy any kind of J2EE web application onto a worldwide network. Moreover they can use the services the framework provides, which let developers concentrate on the real aspects of the web application to develop, thus forgetting about persistence, security, load balancing, failover and others.

Quick facts

Web application edge service
Web services availability and decentralized UDDI
Secure J2EE application and Axis web services deployment
Decentralized J2EE application and Axis web services deployment
Uniform application location - using URI-style addresses like p2p://domain/document_or_services
Transparent adaptation and load balancing of web applications
Decentralized persistence mechanisms
Database persistence edge service
BitTorrent transfer protocol support
A new p2p Application Programmer's Interface (API) available, including anycall and manycall abstractions
Open source licensed under LGPL license

More information

Learn more by downloading the initial SNAP white paper [pdf-whitepaper].

p2pWeb Concept

SNAP provides the necessary web infrastructure to fully support the p2pWeb concept. We foresee promising cross-fertilizations of peer-to-peer and Web models in the next years. Although both models are already influencing each other, there is still a lack of seamless integration between them in order to achieve constructive synergies.

Our p2pWeb model aims to bring all the benefits and unused resources of the edges of the Internet to the mature and standardized world of Web applications and services. With this approach, existing web applications and services can make use of the resources of the network, but also obtain in a transparent way fault tolerance and load balancing services.

The main difference is that we offer a new substrate with innovative capabilities to the existing web development environment. In order to develop world –wide scalable applications, developers do not need to reinvent the wheel creating overlay networks and services. We thus provide a smooth transition from web applications and services to the decentralized peer-to-peer model.

p2p Middleware

In order to create a p2pWeb platform, we have worked in peer-to-peer middleware research area during the last years. We have developed the necessary middleware to support decentralized solutions like Bunshin (a Distributed Hash Table), Dermi (a Distributed Remote Object Middleware), p2pCM (a Wide-Area Component Model) and p2pWeb Services (Service Oriented Architecture).

Related applications

	d-UDDI is a decentralized service registry that follows the Java standard (JAX-R) and offers a similar services as other UDDI implementations. The main available features are as follows: p2p URL support Tag-oriented Keyword based Development version available on the Download section.

	Jounin is a decentralized workspace framework. The p2p Portlet concept is very important inside it and its interfaces (view, edit and help). Each portlet is a tool of the workspace and can be deployed in any node around the network. Advanced AJAX Interface Portlet-oriented Participants and Portals profiling Development version available on the Download section.

DeskShot! is a decentralized desktop application, which allows users to store personal information regarding documents, bookmarks, etc. The main available features are as follows:

Support for personal bookmark storage in a decentralized fashion
Store your documents and download them from anywhere
Support for personal shared folders
Worldwide availability to your own data, regardless of node failures

Development version available on the CVS repository.