A Lightweight Middleware for Developing P2P Applications with Component and Service-Based Principles

Developing Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications became increasingly important in software development. Nowadays, a large number of organizations from many different sectors and sizes depend more and more on collaboration between actors to perform their tasks. Since P2P applications are usually implemented as sets of strongly encapsulated functions, they can benefit from the advantages of component-oriented development. In the literature, there exists a large number of component based approaches. However, most of them are not adapted to P2P applications. In this paper, we present a middleware that combines component-oriented development with well-understood methods and techniques from the field of Service Oriented Computing (SOC) and P2P Computing in order to develop and deploy P2P applications in an effortless and effective way. This middleware is called SON (Shared-data Overlay Network).