The final project I want to accomplish this semester in my distributed computing independent study, is to come up with a way to access p2p capabilities from within the browser. I was originally hoping to do this with JavaScript API that relied behind the scenes on the new flash p2p protocol, rtmfp. The protocol has been around since last spring, but development for it is not exactly optimal. You need to be using flash to make the movie, and you need a proprietary and expensive piece of server software to coordinate data transfers. The protocol itself is still proprietary, meaning that Adobe won’t actually tell you how to make a server that can work with it, or how data is sent across the wire.
They finally have started advertising it at least, and so it will gain some prominence, and eventually the details will come to light, but for now it is unrealistic to attempt to use flash for a general server agnostic service. (http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/10mar/slides/tsvarea-1.pdf)
Instead, my plan is to modify the open source privoxy software and add p2p capabilities at that layer. My eventual goal is to make a communal grease-monkey system, where pages can be modified by the user through pieces of JavaScript, and those scripts can then be shared to friends. With the right level of abstraction, I think that this can produce a very powerful system. Starting next week, I’ll begin reading and hacking privoxy to find out how to integrate new code into that project.