Date: Dec. 3, 2001
Link: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/p2presearch/chapter/ch01.html
Source Author or Organization: By Dale Dougherty, O'Reilly Research

All The Pieces of PIE is a chapter excerpted from 2001 P2P Networking Overview by O'Reilly & Associates, a report from O'Reilly Research. The report offers a comprehensive, hard data-backed analysis of the present state and projected future development of P2P networking and covers 50 of the approximately 150 P2P-related companies in existence.

This chapter examines Napster, not technically a pure P2P implementation but a network application that illustrated the "P2P mindset" driving innovation today by utilizing underused resources at the "edge" of the Internet to achieve historic scalability. The report explains how Napster helped reawaken interest in the power of the decentralization that was a founding principle of the Internet.

An inspection of several P2P companies demonstrates the core constituents of today's P2P applications: Presence, Identity and Edge Resources (PIE).

P2P's forecasted evolution is described, from individual Napster-like applications to a network operating system or platform, driven by a set of P2P networking services and developed standards. The chapter ends by comparing and contrasting P2P and the Web Services set of related technologies. An increasing symbiosis between P2P and Web Services will be covered in an upcoming O'Reilly Research Report on Web Services.