Data-oriented Networking



Internet Engineering Task Force
INTERNET-DRAFT
Expires March 2003




		       Data-oriented networking

			   by Brent Baccala
			 baccala@freesoft.org
			     August, 2002





This document is an Internet-Draft and is subject to all provisions of
Section 10 of RFC2026.

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			       ABSTRACT

   Differentiates between connection-oriented and data-oriented
   networking, identifies the advantages of data-oriented networks,
   argues that Internet web architecture is becoming more
   data-oriented, and suggests ways of encouraging and accelerating
   this trend.



Contemporary Internet architecture is heavily connection-oriented.  IP
underlies almost all Internet operations, and its fundamental
operation is to deliver a data packet to an endpoint.  TCP uses IP to
sequence streams of data packets to those endpoints; higher-level
services, such as HTTP, are built using TCP.  All of these operations
are based upon the underlying IP addresses, which identify specific
machines and devices.  Even UDP operations are connection-oriented in
the sense that UDP addresses identify a specific machine on the
Internet with which a connection (even just a single packet) must be
established.  Note that I use the term connection-oriented in a
somewhat different sense than the traditional distinction between
connection-oriented and connection less protocols.

More recently, Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) have emerged as the
dominant means for users to identify web resources.  The distinction
is not merely one of introducing a new protocol with new terminology,
either.  URLs are used to name blocks of data, not network devices.
Especially with the advent of caching, it's now clear that a web
browser may not have to make any network connections at all in order
to retrieve and display a web page.  "Retrieving" a URL differs
significantly from opening an HTTP session, since an HTTP session
implies a network connection to a named device, while accessing a URL
implies only that its associated data (stored, perhaps, on a local
disk) is made available.  HTTP, SMTP, ssh, and other TCP-based
protocols are inherently connection-oriented, while the URL is
inherently data-oriented.

The Internet is moving away from a connection-oriented model and
becoming more data-oriented.  Since the original Internet design was
modeled, at least loosely, after a telephone system, all of its
original protocols were connection-oriented.  Increasingly, we're
becoming aware that often a user is not interested in connecting to
such-and-such a computer, but rather in retrieving a specific piece of
data.  Since such operations are so common, Internet architects need
to recognize the distinction between connection-oriented and
data-oriented operations and design networks to support both well.
Data-oriented models will not replace connection-oriented models;
sometimes, you'll still want to make the telephone call.  Rather, the
pros and cons of each need to be understand, so both can be
incorporated into the Internet of the 21st century.

To understand the emergence of data-oriented networking, it is useful
to consider the historical development of the Internet.  Initially,
the driving application for what became the Internet was email,
allowing virtually instantaneous communications over large distances,
FTP and TELNET were second and third.  FTP provided file transfer and
a rudimentary publication system; TELNET extended the 1970s command
line interface over the network, letting people "log in" over the net,
thus allowing remote use and management of computer systems.

Even in these early years of the Internet, the network was becoming
more data-oriented than a cursory examination of its protocols would
suggest.  FTP archive sites, such as uunet and wuarchive, began
assembling collections of useful data, including programs, protocol
documents, and mailing list archives in central locations.  Other
sites began mirroring the archives, so that retrieving a particular
program, for example, did not require a connection to a centralized
server for the program, but only a connection to a convenient mirror
site.  The practice continues to this day.  Of course, accessing the
mirror sites required using the connection-oriented protocols, and the
process of finding a mirror site or archive that contained the
particular program you wanted remained largely a manual process.  It
still does.

A significant change occurred during the 1980s - the appearance of
graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in personal computers by the end of
the decade.  In the early to mid 90s, the world wide web extended the
GUI over the network, much as TELNET had extended the command line
interface over the net.  More than anything else, the web represents a
global GUI, a means of providing the commonly accepted point-and-click
interface to users around the world.

It is impossible to understate the impact of the web.  The GUI was a
critical technology that made computers more accessible to the average
person.  No longer did you need to type cryptic instructions at a
command prompt.  To open a file, represented by a colorful icon, just
move a pointer to it and click.  Yet until the web, you still needed
to use the old command-line interface to use the network.  Your
desktop PC might use a GUI, but connecting to another computer
generally meant a venture into TELNET or FTP.  The web extended the
GUI metaphor over the network.  Instead of learning FTP commands to
retrieve a file, you could just browse to a web site and click on an
icon.

Other technologies could have provided a network GUI, but not as well
as HTML and HTTP.  X Windows certainly was designed specifically with
network GUI applications in mind, but provided so little security that
using it to "browse" potentially untrusted sites was never realistic.
AT&T's Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is similar to X Windows, and is
designed so that its effects can be confined to a single window.  With
some extensions, it could be used as the basis for a network GUI.
However, both X Windows and VNC share a single common major flaw -
they are connection-oriented protocols that presuppose a real-time
link between client and server.  The user types on the keyboard or
clicks on a link, then the client transmits this input to the server,
which processes the input and sends new information to the client,
which redraws the screen.  X Windows has never been widely used over
the global Internet, because the bandwidth and delay requirements for
interactive operation are more stringent than the network can
typically provide.  VNC is very useful for using GUI systems remotely,
but still doesn't provide the performance of local software.

The present HTML/HTTP-based design of the web does have one
overwhelming advantage over X Windows / VNC, however.  The web is
data-oriented, not connection-oriented, or is at least more so than
conventional protocols.  A web page is completely defined by a block
of HTML, which is downloaded in a single operation.  Highlighting of
links, typing into fill-in forms, scrolling - all are handled locally
by the client.  Rather than requiring a connection to remain open to
communicate mouse and keyboard events back to the server, the entire
behavior of the page is described in the HTML.

The advent of web caches changes this paradigm subtly, but
significantly.  In a cache environment, the primitive operation in
displaying a web page is no longer an end-to-end connection to the web
server, but the delivery of a named block of data, specifically the
HTML source code of a web page, identified by its URL.  The presence
of a particular DNS name in the URL does not imply that a connection
will be made to that host to complete the request.  If a local cache
has a copy of the URL, it will simply be delivered, without any wide
area operations.  Only if the required data is missing from the local
caches will network connections be opened to retrieve the data.

Experience with web caches demonstrates that data-oriented networks
provide several benefits.  First, the bandwidth requirements of a
heavily cached, data-oriented network is much less than a
connection-oriented network.  Connection-oriented protocols such as X
windows, VNC, and TELNET presuppose a real-time connection between
client and server, and in fact could not operate without such a
connection, since the protocols do not specify how various user
events, such as keyclicks, should be handled.  All the protocols do is
to relay the events across the network, where the server decides how
to handle them, then sends new information back to the client in
response.  A data-oriented network, which specifies the entire
behavior of the web page in a block of HTML, does not require a
real-time connection to the server.  Having retrieved the data to
describe a web page, the connection can be severed and the user can
browse through the page, scrolling, filling out forms, watching
animations, all without any active network connection.  Only when the
user moves to another web page is a connection required to retrieve
the data describing the new page.  Furthermore, since the data
describing the pages is completely self-contained, no connection to
the original server is required at all if a copy of the web page can
be found.  A copy, stored anywhere on the network, works as well as
the original.  As the network becomes more data-oriented, fewer and
briefer connections are required to carry out various operations,
reducing overall network load.

A data-oriented network is also more resilient to failures and
partitions than a connection-oriented network.  Consider the
possibility of a major network failure, such as the hypothetical
nuclear strike that originally motivated the Defense Department to
build the packet-based network that evolved into the Internet.  Modern
routing protocols would probably do a fairly good job of rerouting
connections around failed switching nodes, probably in a matter of
minutes, but what if the destination server itself were destroyed?
The connection would be lost, and no clear fallback path presents
itself.  The obvious solution is to have backup copies of the server's
data stored in other locations, but creating and then finding these
backups is currently done by hand.  Existing routing protocols can
reroute connections, but are woefully inadequate for rerouting data.

A more mundane, but far more common scenario is the partitioned
network.  Simply operating in a remote area may dictate long periods
of operation without network connectivity.  In such an environment,
it'd be convenient to drop any information that might be needed on a
set of CD-ROMs.  That works fine until the first search page comes up
that connects to a specialized program on the web server, or a CGI
script that presents dynamic content, or an image map.  Solutions have
been developed to put web sites on CD-ROMs - none of them standard,
most of them incomplete.  A more data-oriented design, that didn't
depend on connections to a server, would be far better suited to such
situations.

HTML, the workhorse protocol of the web, was never designed with use
as a network GUI in mind, even though this is the role it has evolved
into.  It's the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and hypertext is not
a GUI.  Hypertext is text that includes hyperlinks.  Perhaps we can
expand the definition somewhat into a "hyperdocument" that can include
colors, diagrams, pictures, and even animation.  A GUI is much more
than a hyperdocument, however.  A GUI is a complete user interface
that provides the human front end to a program.  Not only can it
include dialog boxes, pull down menus and complex mouse interactions,
but more than anything else it provides the interface to a program,
which could perform any arbitrary task, and is thus not just a
document.  The program could be a document browser, a document editor,
a remote login client, a language translator, a simulation package,
anything.  What was pioneered by Xerox PARC, deployed by Apple Lisa,
marketed by Macintosh and brought with such stunning success to the
masses by Microsoft was not hypertext, but the GUI.  The GUI is what
we are trying to extend across the network, not hypertext, and thus
HTML just isn't very well suited for the task.

Since it wasn't designed to provide a network GUI, HTML doesn't
provide the right primitives for the task it has been asked to
perform, and thus we've seen a long series of alterations and
enhancements.  First there was HTML 2, then HTML 3, then HTML 4, now
HTML with Cascading Style Sheets, soon XHTML, plus Java applets,
Javascript, CGI scripts, servlets, etc, etc...  The fact that HTML has
had to change so much, and that the changes require network-wide
software updates, is a warning sign that the protocol is poorly
designed.  The problem is that HTML has been conscripted as a network
GUI, though, to this day, it has never been clearly designed with this
goal in mind.  Part of what is needed is a replacement for HTML
specifically designed to act as a network GUI.

In addition, one of the great challenges to a data-oriented model is
dynamic pages.  Presently, web caching protocols provide means for
including meta information, in either HTTP or HTML, that inhibits
caching on dynamic pages, and thus forces a connection back to the
origin server.  While this works, it breaks the data-oriented metaphor
we'd like to transition towards.  To maintain the flexibility of
dynamic content in a data-oriented network, we need to lose the
end-to-end connection requirement and this seems to imply caching the
programs that generate the dynamic web pages.  While cryptographic
techniques for verifying the integrity of data have been developed and
are increasingly widely deployed, no techniques are known for
verifying the integrity of program execution on an untrusted host,
such as a web cache.  Baring a technological breakthrough, it seems
impossible for a cache to reliably run the programs required to
generate dynamic content.  The only remaining solution is to cache the
programs themselves (in the form of data), and let the clients run the
programs and generate the dynamic content themselves.  Thus, another
part of what's needed is a standard for transporting and storing
programs in the form of data.

An important change in moving to a more data-oriented network would be
to replace HTML with a standard specifically designed to provide a
data-oriented network GUI.  The features of this new protocol:

  1) It must be data-oriented, not connection-oriented.  Thus, the
     protocol must define a data format that can describe GUI behavior
     on a remote system.  HTML already basically does this.

  2) It must programmatic.  The whole point is to eliminate the server
     and replace it with a standard, network-deliverable specification
     of the GUI behavior.  The exact behaviors of GUI interfaces
     vary dramatically, and simply providing an escape mechanism
     to connect back to the server violates the data-oriented
     design goal.  Thus, the protocol must implement powerful enough
     primitives to describe arbitrary GUI behaviors without escape
     mechanisms, i.e. it must support arbitrary programming constructs.

  3) It must be secure.  Since the program may be untrusted to
     the client, it must be limited from performing arbitrary
     operations on the client system.

  4) It must provide GUI primitives, and cleanly interact with other
     GUI applications, such as window managers, and provide features
     such as drag-and-drop functionality between windows.

  5) It must provide backwards compatibility with the existing web.

The programmatic requirement fairly well dictates some kind of
virtual machine architecture, and the obvious candidate is therefore
Java, but Java may or may not be the best choice.  Netscape began
work on a 100% Java web browser, but abandoned this effort in 1998.
Commenting on the demise of "Javagator", Marc Andreesen quipped - "it's
slower, it will crash more and have fewer features... it will simplify
your life".

This misses the point.  We're not trying to build an Java-based HTML
web browser that would simply achieve cross-platform operability.  The
goal is to build a web browser that, as its primary metaphor, presents
arbitrary Java-based GUIs to the user.  HTML could be displayed using
a Java HTML browser.  The difference is that the web site designer
controls the GUI by providing the Java engine for the client to use
for displaying any particular page.  Switching to a different web site
(or web page) might load a different GUI for interacting with that
site's HTML, or XML, or whatever.  Unlike Andreesen's "Javagator", the
choose of GUI is under control of the web server, not tied into a
Java/HTML web browser.

For example, consider if a web site wants to allow users to edit its
HTML pages in a controlled way.  Currently, you have a few choices,
none completely satisfactory.  First, you could put your HTML in an
HTML textbox, and allow the user to edit it directly, clicking a
submit button to commit it and see what the page will actually look
like.  Alternately, you could allow the HTML to be edited with
Netscape Composer or some third party HTML editor on the client,
accepting the HTML back from the client in a POST operation.  This
provides the server very little control over exactly what the user can
and can't do to the page.  Since parts of the page might be
automatically generated, this isn't satisfactory, nor do we really
know much about this unspecified "third party editor".  On the other
hand, with a Java browser, the web site could simply provide a
modified HTML engine that would allow the user to edit the page, in a
manner completely specified by the web designer, prohibiting
modifications to parts of the page automatically generated, and
allowing special cases, such as spreadsheet tables with the page, to
be handled specially.

Another advantage to this proposal is that it provides a solution to a
problem plaguing XML - how do you actually display to the user the
information you've encoded in XML?  This is left glaringly unaddressed
by the XML standards, the solution seeming to be that you either use a
custom application capable of manipulating the particular XML data
structures, or present the data in two different formats - XHTML for
humans and XML for machines.  A Java-based web browser addresses this
problem.  You ship only one format - XML - along with a Java
application that parses and presents it to the user.

On the other hand, let's keep Andressen's criticism in mind. Java may
not be suitable for such a protocol, for either technical or political
reasons.  The speed issues seem to be largely addressed by the current
generation of Just-In-Time (JIT) Java runtimes, but whatever the
standard is, it should be an RFC-published, IETF standard-track
protocol, and if the intellectual property issues around Java preclude
this, then something else needs to replace it.  Alternatives include
Parrot, the yet unfinished Perl 6 runtime, and Microsoft's .NET
architecture, based around a virtual machine architecture recently
adopted as ECMA standard ECMA-335.

PDF also deserves consideration.  Though it lacks the generality to
provide a network GUI, its presentation handling is vastly superior to
HTML's, giving the document author complete control over page layout,
and allowing the user to zoom the document to any size for easy
viewing.  It is also easier to render than HTML, since its page layout
is more straightforward for the browser to understand.

A definite metaphor shift is required.  Rather than viewing HTML as
the primary standard defining the web, the primary standard must
become Java or something like it, that provides full programmability.
Browsing a web page becomes downloading and running the code that
defines that page's behavior, rather than downloading and displaying
HTML, that might contain an embedded applet.

Backwards compatability can be provided along the lines of HotJava,
Sun's proprietary Java-based web browser, which implements HTML in
Java.  To display an HTML page, Java classes are loaded which parse
the HTML and display it within a Java application.  The browser
provides little more than a Java runtime that can download arbitrary
Java and run it in a controlled environment.  Initially, 99% of the
pages would be HTML, viewed using a standard (and cached) HTML engine
coded in Java.

Notwithstanding the creeping featurism present in Java, adopting this
approach would avoid the creeping featurism so grossly apparent in web
browsers.  Even the casual observer will note that mail, news, and
teleconferencing are simply bloat that results in multi-megabyte
"kitchen sink" browsers.  Will the next release of Netscape, one might
ask, contain an Emacs mail editor with its embedded LISP dialect?  And
if not, why not?  Only because the majority of users wouldn't use
Emacs to edit their mail?  Why should we all be forced to use one type
of email browser?  Why should we have Netscape's email browser
packaged into our web browser if we don't use it?  Like the constant
versioning of HTML, the shear size of modern browsers is a warning
sign that the web architecture is fundamentally flawed.  A careful
attempt to standardize "network Java" would hopefully result in
smaller, more powerful browsers that don't have to be upgraded every
time W3C revs HTML; you simply update the Java GUI on those particular
sites that are taking advantage of the newer features.

Another tremendous advantage is the increased flexibility provided to
web designers.  HTML took a big step in this direction with Cascading
Style Sheets, but CSS doesn't provide the power of a full GUI.  For
example, if a web page designer wanted to, he could publish an HTML
page with a custom Java handler that allowed certain parts of the HTML
text to be selectively edited by the user.  This simply can't be done
using CSS.

Network-deliverable, data-oriented GUIs aren't a panacea, or course.
For starters, one of the advantages of the present model is that all
web pages have more or less the same behavior (since they are all
viewed with the same GUI).  The "Back" and "Forward" buttons are
always in the same place, the history function always works the same
way, you click on a link and basically the same thing happens as
happens on any other page.  Providing the web designer with the
ability to load a custom GUI changes all that.  Standards need to be
developed for finding and respecting user preferences concerning the
appearance of toolbars, the sizing of fonts, the operation of links.
The maturing Java standards have already come a long way towards
addressing issues such as drag-and-drop that would have to be
effectively implemented in any network GUI.

Hurdles need be crossed before we can reach a point where web
designers can depend on Java-specific features.  One possibility would
be to migrate by presenting newer web pages to older browsers using a
Java applet embedded in the web page.  Performance might suffer, but
clever design would hopefully make it tolerable.  For starters,
consider that the web page data presented to the applet need not be
the source HTML, but could be a processed version with page layout
already done.  Newer, Java-only browsers should be leaner and faster.

In summary, I recommend the following steps:

1. Recognize the importance of data-oriented design, as opposed to
   connection-oriented design.  Break the dependence on special server
   configurations and realize that the client has to do almost all the
   work in a scalable, cached, redundant web architecture.

2. Migrate the web towards being based on a model of a network GUI,
   rather than a massively enhanced hypertext system.

3. Select a standard for the network delivery of executable content,
   Java being the most likely candidate

4. Develop a Java-based HTML browser along the lines of HotJava, but
   completely open, allowing existing HTML-based websites to be
   browsed via Java.  Provide an applet version that allows web
   designers to specify a custom Java applet to browse their HTML
   sites using conventional web browsers.

5. Develop a lean, fully Java-based web browser, with Multivalent
   being the most obvious candidate.

6. Recognize the transient nature of HTML/HTTP and specify their
   operation in terms of a generic API, based on the network
   executable content standard (probably Java), for finding and
   delivering the GUI presented by a specified URL.

With all the inertia built up behind the present web design, one needs
to question the wisdom of abandoning HTML and completely re-vamping
the structure of the web, even if a migration path is in place.  The
promise of data-oriented networking is a leaner, more reliable, more
efficient network.  Ultimately, if this analysis is correct, then the
cost of migrating away from a flawed design will ultimately be less
than the cost of constantly shoehorning it.  However, in his essay,
"The Rise of 'Worse is Better'", Richard Gabriel suggests "that it is
often undesirable to go for the right thing first.  It is better to
get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a
virus."  Bearing this in mind, I've proposed an alternate set of
recommendations, aimed at something more immediately practical, in a
companion essay, "Standardized caching of dynamic web content".  At
the same time, I think it's time to take another look at the
Java-based web browser, and to seriously ask if Java isn't a better
choice than HTML for a network standard GUI.




REFERENCES

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) / Extensible Markup Language (XML)

   HTML has a long and sordid history.  HTML version 2, specified in
   RFC 1866, was one of the earliest (1995) documented HTML versions.
   Later revisions added tables (RFC 1942), applets (HTML 3.2),
   JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (HTML 4.01).

   http://www.w3c.org/MarkUp/

Universal Resource Locators

   RFC 1630 - Universal Resource Identifiers in WWW

   RFC 1737 - Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names, a
      short document notable for its high-level overview of URN
      requirements

   RFC 1738 - Uniform Resource Locators, a technical document of more
      importance to programmers than architects

Authentication

   International standard X.509 (not available on-line)

   http://www.openssl.org/

   http://www.openssh.org/

DNS Security

   RFC 2535 - Domain Name System Security Extensions

   RFC 2536 - DSA KEYs and SIGs in the Domain Name System

   RFC 2538 - Storing Certificates in the Domain Name System

   RFC 3110 - RSA/SHA-1 SIGs and RSA KEYs in the Domain Name System

Postscript/PDF

   Postscript specification
      http://www.adobe.com/products/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf

   PDF Reference: Adobe portable document format version 1.4
   (ISBN 0-201-75839-3)
   http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/docs/filefmtspecs/PDFReference.pdf

   Ghostscript - freely available Postscript interpreter that also
      reads and writes PDF and thus can be used to convert PS to PDF

   Multivalent (see below) includes a Java PDF viewer

   html2ps - a largely illegible Perl script written by Jan Karrman
      to convert HTML to Postscript.  Yes, it can be done.

X Windows

   Developed by an MIT-lead consortium, X Windows is one of the most
   successful network GUIs
   http://www.x.org/

VNC (Virtual Network Computing)

   Similar in concept to X Windows, but radically different in
   design - an absurdly simple protocol combined with various
   compression techniques to achieve decent WAN performance
   http://www.uk.research.att.com/

Java

   Java Virtual Machine (JVM) specification

   Bill Venner's excellent Under the Hood series for JavaWorld
   is a better starting point than the spec for understanding JVM.
   He also has written a book - Inside the Java Virtual Machine
   (McGraw-Hill; ISBN 0-07-913248-0)
      http://www.javaworld.com/columns/jw-hood-index.shtml

   Java 2 language reference

   Java languages page
      http://grunge.cs.tu-berlin.de/~tolk/vmlanguages.html

   Criticism of Java
      http://www.jwz.org/doc/java.html

Other virtual machines

   Perl 5 runtime

   Parrot - Perl 6 runtime
      http://www.parrotcode.com/

   Microsoft's .NET architecture includes the Common Language
   Infrastucture, based around a virtual machine, now adopted as
   ECMA-335
      http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/ecma/
      http://www.ecma.ch/ecma1/STAND/ecma-335.htm

Various Java-based web browsers

   HotJava, Sun's Java browser, but with binary-only licensing
      http://java.sun.com/products/hotjava/

   Multivalent, an open-source web browser written totally in Java,
   with an extension API to add "behaviors" similar to applets
      http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~phelps/Multivalent/

   NetBeans, an attempt to develop a "fully functional Java browser"
      http://netbrowser.netbeans.net/

   Jazilla, a now defunct attempt to carry the "Javagator" project
   forward under an open source banner
      http://jazilla.sourceforge.net/

Java Servlets/WARs

   "Tomcat is the servlet container that is used in the official
    Reference Implementation for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages
    technologies."
      http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/

   Java Servlets - server-side Java API (CGI-inspired; heavily
   HTTP-based) The Java servlet specification includes a chapter
   specifying the WAR (Web Application Archive) file format, an
   extension of ZIP/JAR
      http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/

Caching

   RFC 3040 - Internet Web Replication and Caching Taxonomy
      broad overview of caching technology

   RFC 2186 - Internet Cache Protocol (ICP), version 2

   RFC 2187 - Application of ICP

   Squid software
   http://www.squid-cache.org/

   NLANR web caching project
   http://www.ircache.net/

   Various collections of resources for web caching
      http://www.web-cache.com/
      http://www.web-caching.com/
      http://www.caching.com/

   IETF Web Intermediaries working group (webi)
      http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/OLD/web-charter.html

   IETF Web Replication and Caching working group (wrec)
      http://www.wrec.org/

   RFC 3143 - Known HTTP Proxy/Caching problems

   Cache Array Routing Protocol (CARP) - used by Squid
      http://www.microsoft.com/Proxy/Guide/carpspec.asp
      http://www.microsoft.com/proxy/documents/CarpWP.exe

   RFC 2756 - Hypertext Caching Protocol (HTCP) - use by Squid

Napster and its variants

   Napster, the original peer-to-peer file sharing service, has been
   fraught with legal difficulties, having recently entered bankruptcy
      http://www.napster.com/

   Napster's protocol lives on, even if the service is dead.  It's
   basically a centralized directory with distributed data
      http://opennap.sourceforge.net/
      http://opennap.sourceforge.net/napster.txt

   Gnutella has emerged as the leading post-Napster protocol,
   employing both a distributed directory and distributed data
      http://www.gnutella.com/
      http://www.gnutelladev.com/
      http://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/doc/gnutella.html

   Several popular clients use the Gnutella network and protocol
      http://www.morpheus-os.com/
      http://www.limewire.org/
      http://www.winmx.com/

   Other proprietary peer-to-peer systems
      http://www.kazaa.com/

   Other free peer-to-peer systems
      http://www.freenetproject.org/

Richard Gabriel, "The Rise of 'Worse is Better'"
   http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

Brent Baccala, "Standardized caching of dynamic web content"
   http://www.freesoft.org/Essays/dynamic-content-caching/

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