pittendrigh wrote:

Your site mentions peer to peer file sharing. If your application
is written in Java (good deal if it is) then I'm curious about how
you did the P2P file sharing. Did you/do you use JXTA file
sharing?

P2P works fine for music file sharing, where everybody is sharing
music files with well-known names. But P2P is not so useful for
scientific data, where each data file is unique, and all too often
stored with file names like Hpb342a.tiff In that case P2P file
sharing
is usthe system useless, unless there is a centralized discovery
mechanism.

Yes, naming is an issue. But I I've implemented something similar to
downloading MP3's with apps like LimeWire. If the file name already
exists you are given the option to replace or rename. File names are
really unimportant, what is important is the name of the fly pattern.

I looked into JXTA and it seemed to be overkill for what I needed. I
want to keep this simple so essentially what I did is coded my own
version of the old Napster architecture. It's small, simple, and works
great for this application. I have had many people test the program and
really the only drawback I've seen is that people need to open or
forward a port in their firewall and they aren't doing it which results
in some transfers failing. I'm working on a solution to that.

FlySource is really in its infancy and has lots of room to grow, but
from the feedback I've received so far people really like it. I hope
you give it a try, I've really found it interesting just browsing
through the 1000 or so patterns available. As the user base grows, more
and more patterns will become available.