Exploring p2p solutions available to Clojure / on the JVM

[berkan]

libp2p/jvm-libp2p: a libp2p implementation for the JVM, written in Kotlin 🔥

Active and frequently updated project.

Usable/working modules for:

• Peer Discovery: mDNS (Local peer discovery with zero configuration using multicast DNS).
• Transport mechanism: TCP, Websockets
• Communication (Payload): Plaintext, Noise
• Publish/Subscribe: gossip, flood

So, the current state of the library limits peers to be on the local LAN, but this will change when they finish work on Kad-DHT.

[berkan]

techascent/p2p-chat: A Peer-to-Peer chat using re-frame, reagent and libp2p

Toy example using libp2p in Clojurescript -- peers run in the browser, but libp2p's pub/sub model and the clojurescript code are good for study:

• [...] each browser window connects to a bootstrapped peer list using libp2p and then subscribes to a "topic"
• Under the covers, libp2p uses web-sockets to connect the client to a set of distributed peers -- meaning it doesn't need a centralized server for communiations.
• Messages that are sent are published and each node "subscribes" to these updates.
• When the node gets an update, it populates its own local "app db" in re-frame with the relevant message
• The messages view then gets the update and shows it to each of the users.

[berkan]

Peergos/nabu: A minimal Java implementation of IPFS

Active and and frequently updated project, using (and contributing to) jvm-lib2p2.

Specifically and most relevant for us is the chat app below, where nodes find & connect to each other and exchange messages only by knowing each other's ids.

Peergos/nabu-chat: simple cmd line chat using nabu primitives