Book excerpt: Scott Oaks, lead author of O'Reilly's new JXTA in a Nutshell says,"Fundamental scalability and centralization forces are constraining the Internet and are restricting its growth. Peer-to-peer networks like JXTA are essential to bring the internet to the next level of scalability, management and security in order to handle unconstrained exchanges of information between peers and the wave of new consumer devices."Written by the key members of Sun Microsystem's Project JXTA, JXTA in a Nutshell is the definitive reference to the most solid platform yet for Peer-to-Peer distributed computing. "P2P" enables users with the same networking application to connect with each other and directly access files from one another's hard drives. JXTA is a giant step forward in the evolution of P2P.O'Reilly's pioneering reference is the first and last word on this powerful distributed computing technology. JXTA in a Nutshell delivers all the information you need to get started, including an overview of P2P distributed computing, an explanation of the JXTA Project's new platform, and ways that developers can become a part of the development effort.JXTA in a Nutshell introduces major concepts in a hands-on way by explaining them in context to the shell, and contains a complete reference to the JXTA application bindings. Also included is the full JXTA protocol specification. The book covers important topics such as security, and how the JXTA technology fits into the standard Java classes.