Graham Glass, CTO of the Mind Electric, explains differences between Gaia and Jini (from Glue mailing list at Yahoo). The Mind Electric is the makers of Glue (web services platform) and Gaia (P2P platform).

From: "Graham Glass" <graham@t...> Date: Mon Apr 15, 2002 1:30 pm Subject: RE: [MindElectricTechnology] a little more information about GAIA

Hi Luis,

GAIA is only like Jini in the sense that one of its goals is to make it easy to locate and share services. However, unlike Jini:

• it is neutral with respect to platforms and services
• it has built-in support for load balancing, clustering, failover
• it provides these features for data as well as services
• it has native integration with web services standards
• it is simple to use ;-)

GAIA does not treat services in a special way, so there is no "service announcement" as a standalone concept. GAIA makes it easy to publish information, to locate information, and to be informed when certain kinds of information become available. Similarly, there is no "directory service". Instead, GAIA nodes function as a kind of distributed information pool.

Cheers, Graham