P2P, EnThinnai is Not
Oct 23rd, 2007 by Aswath
Brough Turner in his post yesterday mentioned that EnThinnai has “done a peer-to-peer implementation with a choice of query (you only ask when you’re interested in knowing my availability) or subscribe (you want to be notified when I transition to a specific state).” I didn’t flag it because I took it as his way of saying that not all users need to belong to the same central server as is normal in most of the currently deployed Presence servers. As a follow-up to Brough’s post, Paul Sweeney, while commenting positively about the technical aspects of the features in EnThinnai, expresses concern regarding lack of information about the company or people behind this effort, “[e]specially as this is a P2P play”. So I want to confirm in no uncertain terms that EnThinnai is not P2P; it is most assuredly a client-server model. But the difference is that theoretically it is possible for each user to have their own server, that they control and store their digital information. The way it works is that when a buddy of mine wants to access my Availability status information, she will access my server (whether or not she has her own server is immaterial here), upon which my server will authenticate her and then provide the required information. I want to point that it is feasible for me to run EnThinnai in my server with all of my buddies not having their own EnThinnai servers.
Is there any way of doing this where “both parties” have their “virtual server” perhaps even somewhere in the amazon stack?
Paul, the deployed version is a single server solution. This is so because of logistics and financial issue. But our plan is to allow each user to be served by different machines (virtual or otherwise) and be able to exchange information (after authentication) and make it available as if they were all served by a single server. I hope I have answered your question, because I am not sure I fully understand your question.