2: The JP2P Container

It may seem  from the previous that the JP2P container is a very complicated bit of code, like the J2EE containers, but actually the container is very simple; it is little more than a collection of JP2P components, which implement the net.jp2p.IJp2pComponent interface. In fact, the container itself implements this interface!  JP2P components come in three flavours:

1. Component: the simplest instance, which is basically a wrapper around a POJO
2. ComponentNode: as above, but which can have child nodes
3. JP2P Service: a stateful node that can be started, stopped and paused.

Take for instance a Component node that wraps the NetworkManager of JXTA^TM.You may be tempted to think that this is implemented as a JP2P service-because in JXTA^TM we use the Network Manager to start and stop the network, but it actually is divided over three distinct JP2P components:

• The NetworkManager component node
• The NetworkConfigurator child node
• The Netpeergroup service, which actually starts and stops the network

When you start the RDV template project, you will see these services appear in the JP2P navigator.

As a result, the JP2P container is therefore not a linear transformation of JXTA^TM functionality, but in general it should not be too difficult to see the relationship between them.