In October of 1997, Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, began development of Groove. Groove is a peer-to-peer application platform for building and deploying peer-to-peer applications. Because Groove takes care of the underlying connectivity and synchronization issues, developers can concentrate on creating applications in the peer-to-peer space. While the technology under the hood of Groove is cutting-edge and somewhat daunting, the actual process of creating applications is approachable for advanced beginner or intermediate programmers.
The book is organized by first to actually produce and deploy peer-to-peer applications. After exploring the Groove platform. Next, the reader is eased into application development by customizing Groove with a "skin." This exercise will demonstrate how XML and external resources are used in Groove, and will detail a step that the reader will probably want to take for each application developed and deployed.
The first tutorial will begin the creation of a peer-to-peer trivia game application, and will address User Interface (UI), persistence and dissemination issues. This part will require hand-coding of the XML for both understanding and experience. The completion of the second part will result in a working peer-to-peer application, a simple trivia game. Next, we will discuss some advanced topics that deal with administration and database integration. These topics address features provided in the premium version of Groove. Finally, we will include some comments about the future of peer-to-peer and the opportunities it creates for our readers.
