The next Project JXTA Engineering Meeting is happening on March 18 in San Fransisco. Teasingly, the following topics are on the agenda:

• Alternative Peer Group implementations to demonstrate the flexibility of the JXTA architecture. (One size does not fit all needs.)
• Simplifying the Application level JXTA API to ease adoption. (perhaps by wrapping JXTA with the BSD Sockets API or JavaSockets API.)

I’m hoping that this suggests that the JXTA team are giving some thought to the meta-goal of using JXTA to build a ‘platonic network’ on top of TCP/IP, so that current applications can simply slot-in JXTA underneath their current socket calls and get all the advantages of JXTA without the pain. I’m also hoping they give some serious thought to performance issues — my Great Hope for JXTA is that it becomes a very simple API for exploiting distributed resources on the Internet without having to worry about firewall issues and topology, and the above two issues are important markers that this might yet happen. I’m eagerly awaiting the minutes from that meeting…