Project lineage

Superweb, a plan for a for web-based distributed/parallel computation infrastructure, was reported in 1997. Superweb begat Javelin, originally a prototype of Superweb, which was first reported in 1997 as well. The Javelin project recently completed with the graduation of Michael Neary. CX was an outgrowth of the Javelin project with significant architectural differences. JICOS is an outgrowth of both Javelin and CX, although its architecture includes a "tuple space" which makes it more similar to CX than to Javelin. In JICOS, considerable effort has been put into making the API as simple as possible without losing generality and power. The goal is to make JICOS the best Java-based network computing system for parallel computation (as opposed to distributed computing). The term "best" is meant to include commercial-grade design and implementation ... an ongoing effort.

JICOS is a Java-centric network computing service. It is being developed according to the extreme programming paradigm, where the prime objective is to support a community of application programmers. Thus, the initial releases focus on the API. The idea is to allow people to start developing JICOS applications and have a platform on which to test them. JICOS's functionality, scalability, robustness, and performance will be enhanced with many small releases, again, in the extreme programming style.

I am committed to earning a reputation for being responsive to the user community: If you bring to my attention any bug or unclear documentation, I will fix it immediately.