About Peeranha42

This is the project Professional Peers (PoP), a student project at the University of Bremen, Germany, that deals with the elementary problems of peer-to-peer technology (P2P). Therefore we are developing the software solution Peeranha42 (P42) for users and developers. P42 primarily provides easy-to-use functionality for programming P2P applications without having to mess around with P2P networks themselves.

What is Peer-to-Peer?

P2P is a network model, that is based on equality of all network nodes (peers). It is created in contrast to the well known client-server-model. The main characteristic of P2P networks is the autonomy to any central entity. As the communication in client-server networks takes place with central servers, peers communicate directly with each other.

Hence there are three primary advantages in P2P systems, that will make P2P to a realistic alternative to client-server systems:

• No central servers need to be maintained. That keeps the financial costs of P2P systems much lower than those of client-server systems
• The number of so called "bottlenecks" that mostly arise in client-server systems is highly reduced. Thus the performance of P2P networks is much higher.
• Due to their decentralised architecture P2P networks are much more fail-proof.

Despite the advantages of P2P networks the technology is mainly achieved in private sections like file sharing. In our opinion the low count of use is down to two elementary problems:

• On one hand there are no user-friendly and integrative applications that are compatible with each other.
• On the other hand there are no frameworks for developers that offer environments for easily creating powerful P2P applications without being familiar to P2P itself.

We are going to create an all-in-one software that solves these two problems: Peeranha42

What is Peeranha42?

Peeranha42 is an open-source software-package created by the project Professional Peers under the BSD License. It is aimed at users as well as developers and is still under construction. Thus P42 consists of two elementary components, the Peeranha42 Client and the Peeranha42 Development Kit.

The P42 Client is a multifunctional application for P2P networks and is based on the Sun products Java(TM) and JXTA(TM). During the phase of development we consciously decided to use these two products to offer a software with many advantages. The P42 Client is

• platform independent,
• compatible to other P2P applications that make use of the JXTA(TM) technology,
• expandable
• and user-friendly.

Besides chatting, filesharing and gaming applications the P42 Client can be used for a large number of applications. The special plugin architecture of the client assures unlimited numbers of add-ons, so that the client can be used in all kinds of application areas. An overview of current Peeranha42 Plugins is located in the download section of this website. To get an insight into the power of the P42 Client there are already six plugins: P42 Chat, P42 Chess, P42 Filesharing, P42 GameLobby, P42 Peerbay and P42 Pirate Radio.

Furthermore the P42 Development Kit offers a large collection of tools, documentations, tutorials and examples to software developers. Using this framework every developer has the ability to easily and quickly create P42 Plugins. Moreover the simple but powerful plugin interface is abstracted from any P2P technology, so that every software developer has the ability to implement P2P software solutions without having gotten in touch with P2P before.