[ba-ohs-talk] Peer and Web Services are Technologies of Connection and Coordination
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/11/09/udell.html (01)
For a while now, I've been thinking that pure P2P should not be in an OHS
future. Pure client-server shouldn't either. Turns out I'm not alone in
that thinking. Others have been there already. (02)
"The peer-to-peer application most in need of context enrichment is email,
the original and still most successful groupware application. The point
that email is a P2P application, both socially and architecturally, was
made elegantly by Nelson Minar, former CTO of Popular Power. He evaluated
client/server, ring, hierarchical, and mesh topologies along key measures
including extensibility, information coherence, and fault tolerance. And he
showed how emerging P2P systems that compose topologies can exhibit hybrid
rigor. By combining a local client/server style within a global P2P mesh,
for example, Morpheus does better on some key measures than Gnutella.
Should we be surprised to find, therefore, that the topology of Morpheus is
exactly that of Internet email?
Minar's point is that decentralization in and of itself means nothing. It's
one style, centralization another. To be 100% pure P2P is as pointless as
to be 100% pure Java or Perl or Windows or Linux. P2P and Web services are,
some say, building blocks of an Internet operating system. Insofar as they
define interfaces, broker connections, and allocate scarce resources,
that's true, but it sounds oddly sterile. Perhaps the new technologies for
group formation, content superdistribution, and collaborative filtering
should be seen as adaptive responses arising from human colonization of
cyberspace." (03)