The widely-publicized news stories surrounding Napster and Gnutella brought peer-to-peer programming and information sharing technologies to the forefront of the developer community. In the first month after Project JXTA (pronounced Juxta) launched on April 25, 2001 more than 50,000 developers downloaded the code and thousands signed up for JXTA mailing lists to get information about this new technology. JXTA: Java P2P Programming will provide an invaluable introduction to this new technology at a time when developers crave useful information and practical examples. JXTA is a P2P protocol which creates a pathway to pipe information (using XML) to enable communication between services within a community. This can be a network, a workgroup, or between peers across the Internet. JXTA is optimized for P2P connections, and is being ported to C so that in theory it can be used with any platform or tool.