Developing P2P business applications

The recent direction of business applications has been centralization to web-based systems, easing deployment, upgrades and management of application security. However, at same time centralization provides new risks like the introduction of a single point of failure for application usage and in most cases inability to work offline.

At the same time, working culture has started so shift more towards networked individuals, or "web workers" forming ad-hoc coalitions to work on various projects. For them, centralized applications might not be desirable due to data ownership and infrastructure requirements.

Moving the applications from centralized web servers to a peer-to-peer network allows web workers to be in control of their own data, stay productive even in unstable connectivity situations, and collaborate easily with their colleagues in an ad-hoc way.

P2P frameworks for developing business applications

• CouchDb, a RESTful object database
• DBE, a Java P2P service-oriented framework
• Prophet, a P2P-replicated database
• F2F, a Java framework for building P2P business applications using the SIP protocol
• Telepathy Tubes, a way to channel application information over instant messaging networks

Business applications following the P2P model

• Ajatus - a "Personal CRM" built on top of CouchDb
• OpenPsa - project management system doing resourcing over the DBE P2P network
• Simple Defects - a P2P bug tracking system built on top of the Prophet replicated database