[p2p-hackers] Learning how to build a P2P system

[Ian Wiles]

Hello, I am pondering creating my own P2P system, but am having a bit of 
difficulty finding enough technical information. I am looking for 
technical documentation on p2p protocols and more high level stuff for 
the topologies used.

Would any recommend O'Reilly's Peer to Peer and/or Ian Taylors From P2P 
to Web Services and Grids: Peers in a Client/Server World?

I'm hoping that someone could point me in the right direction for web 
based information as obtaining these books depends on the library at the 
moment.

I should also probably give a brief explanation of the system I'd like 
to develop. Basically it's a system to pass around text messages in a 
forum/usenet type of setup. However I would like the news spool to be 
distributed across all nodes, presumably this would require some sort of 
mirroring/backup as well as each node goes offline. This is why I would 
like to find some information on the techniques used, as I'm sure they'd 
be better than the solutions I would come up with. I would like to do 
this using Java as it's the language I'm most familiar with at the 
moment.

The question is, should I bother starting from scratch or is that a 
recipe for disaster? Should I use something such as JXTA instead? I'm 
not to keen on using XML messages, but I'm easily persuaded. Originally 
I had planned on using binary packets.


Thanks.


-- 
Ian