Intel Tuesday says it is embracing the world of peer-to-peer technology with an upcoming suite of technology building blocks, or middleware.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip making giant says the idea is to help accelerate P2P capabilities in software by next generation software application developers.
The P2P technology is expected to be available for evaluation sometime before the end of this year.
“P2P computing offers tremendous potential to expand enterprise and consumer computing based on the power of the desktop PC and Pentium 4 microprocessor,” says Intel Desktop Products Group vice president and general manager Louis Burns. “Intel is developing additional building blocks to address the issues of IT and consumers and reduce time to market for application development.”
The first release of the technology is targeted for XML Web services is expected to improve the creation and set up of peer-to-peer services, using existing industry standards (e.g. SOAP) and development tools.
The technology will be especially important in collaboration, knowledge management / P2P search, and efficient content distribution capabilities to XML Web services applications.
The technology middleware will include support for location independence, encryption and availability. This will help independent software vendors prototype and develop new peer-to-peer capabilities within their applications on the Microsoft
.NET Framework.
The platform was chosen for the first release due to its support for P2P capabilities.
“Intel’s P2P technology highlights the .NET Framework’s features for integrating P2P and XML Web services and will provide a solid step on the road to building interoperable P2P applications,” says Microsoft group program manager David Stutz.
This marks the first technology development of Intel’s P2P program since it was announced at the Intel Developer Forum this spring.