Project JXTA-C: enabling a Web of things

The Web, the collection of all devices connected to the Internet, is on the verge of experiencing a massive evolution from a Web of computers to a Web of things as new devices such as phones, beepers, sensors, wearable computers, telemetry sensors, and tracking agents connect to the Internet. The open-source Project JXTA was initiated a year ago to specify a standard set of protocols for ad hoc, pervasive, peer-to-peer computing as a foundation of the upcoming Web of Things. The following paper presents an up-to-date overview of the JXTA protocols and describes the latest implementation of the JXTA protocols in the "C" programming language. The paper discusses the overall architecture and trade off made to allow the JXTA-C implementation to run on a wide range of devices including supercomputers, servers, PCs, and memory-constrained embedded devices. The JXTA-C implementation delivers a small and efficient implementation of the JXTA protocols stack allowing the JXTA protocols to be embedded at the system level rather than the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) level for optimized performance and capabilities.