Context

Distributed computing becomes more and more commonplace in todays applications. Yet most of the development of distributed applications is limited to cloud infrastructures, effectively centralizing distributed applications. We propose to develop fully distributed applications using an approach that lets multiple users of the same application share computing resources and data. To achieve this goal, we are improving the open-source framework POP-Java with the Trusted Friend Computing concept.

Features

TFC, as released with the lastest POP-Java application, provides the programmer with different tools to develop applications that share objects across a friend network. We introduced the possibility to expose local POP-Java objects on a friend network, which can be searched for instances of those objects. All communications are secured using TSLv1.2, which requires anybody that wants to join a specific network to exchange their security certificate with one of the members of the network. POP-Java gives additional features for a programmer using the TFC functionality, such as monitoring of the exposed POP-Java objects (number of calls, call duration etc.) and the ability to retrieve the caller context, enabling the implementation of access right restrictions (For example differentiating between direct or indirect friends).

A more detailed description and development manual of the TFC features can be found in the TFC documentation.