Peer to Peer

A new information sharing technique that emerged through Internet music-sharing communities such as Napster is called peer to peer (P2P). The term peer to peer is actually borrowed from a related configuration on local area networks (LANs), in which services are decentralized and every computer acts as both a client and a server. The Internet peer-to-peer form allows computers throughout the network to share data in data-sharing communities. In other words, the data doesn’t come from a single web server serving requests from a multitude of clients. Instead, the data resides on ordinary PCs throughout the community.

If you have read this book carefully, you might be wondering how this peer-to-peer scenario I’ve just described is any different from ordinary networking. All I really said in the preceding paragraph is that each peer must be capable of acting as both a client (requesting data) and a server (fulfilling requests). The short answer is that, after the connection is established, peer-to-peer networking is just ordinary networking. The long answer is the reason why peer-to-peer networking is considered somewhat revolutionary.