Where are we today

Posted by zot on February 25th, 2010 filed in P2P, PAST, Plexus, architecture

OK, it’s been a while.

It seems like it, but Plexus is not actually dead. The most recent development on Plexus-proper was in Oct 2008. In 2009, I started working on a new open source p2p platform, called Xus, to address the networking problems we experienced when we worked with Pastry.  I blog about Xus here.  Here is the source and here is the readme.  It’s fairly ambitious, for a one person open source project.  I have the bottom two layers of the architecture working and I’m doing the file sharing now (Git + bittorrent + rsync).  I also have some monitoring working with it.  I’d like Xus to be very easy to work with for developers, with diagnostic tools, firewall configuration aids, and what-not.  When I have reasonable functionality with file sharing, I will return to the Plexus project and change it to use Xus instead of Pastry.  By the way, it’s called Xus because it’s the back-end of Plexus .

Next on the list is switching from Groovy to Scala.  This is because Scala is around 20 times faster and provides all of the advantages of strong typing, but its type inferencing removes most of the pain.  It has a lot of support for functional programming too, and other cool things like actors and packrat parser combinators.

So, that’s the update.  Xus first, then Scala.