Episode 4 - 9P

This episode is a little deviation from our usual Java-from-the-trenches talks to a subject that is a little more experimental but still very interesting. In this one I talk to Nadav Weiner about 9P, a network protocol developed for the Plan 9 from Bell Labs distributed operating system. I didn't know about 9P before Nadav told me about it. The idea of a network protocol to implement a virtual distributed file system with a programmatic API sounded very interesting and so we set out to explore the possibilities for the Java developer.

You can find more resources on the topics we talk about in the following links:

• 9P wikipedia article
  A list of 9P implementations
• Plan 9 from Bell Labs
• Inferno (operating system)
• Hadoop - A java implementation of MapReduce, using the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).
• JCIFS - An Open Source client library that implements the CIFS/SMB networking protocol in 100% Java.
• FUSE - Filesystem in Userspace.
• yanfs - A Java implementation of the XDR, RPC, NFSv2, and NFSv3 protocols in client side form.
• libferris - A virtual filesystem with federated index and search.
• JStyx - A pure-Java implementation of the Styx protocol for distributed systems.