Interactive Help Desk Application

The Interactive Help Desk (IHD) is an example P2P application that has been built using JXTA and also utilises the JXTA Network Module that is presented on this site.

The IHD is a long term project that aims to act as a testbed for gaining practical experience in developing P2P applications, and ultimately, also produce a beneficial tool. The current objectives of the IHD are as follows:

• To provide Instant Messenger support - allowing users to communicate with one another directly and thus obtain 'help' from one another
• To provide a distributed document storage system - allowing users to search the 'network' for documents, data, etc, held on user's peers. 

The IHD is a semi-centralised system, in that there exists a server peer that can facilitate some of functionality (for example, being used as a user/peer lookup). The system will not be able to properly function if no server is currently up and running.

A beta version of the client application can be downloaded off this site.

Features of Application

The current version of the IHD has focused on providing the instant messenger support, and currently the following features are provided:

• User registration - users can register themselves with the server. Not only do they register their name, but they can also choose an avatar to represent them, and express and rate their areas of expertise
• User search - a sophisticated user search engine exists that allows the searching of users by name and by areas of expertise. For example, you can perform a search to find all users who are experts in Java. Multiple expertise areas can be searched, and the system will provide an average overall rating for each found expert i.e could be an expert in Java, but know little about JXTA.
• Contact lists - it is possible to build up and maintain a list of 'buddies'
• User presence - users can assign themselves one of four states. Off-line, Away, Busy and On-line. A change in user presence results in all interested parties being informed
• Exchange of messages - users can exchange text messages between each other
• Exchange of pictures - users can exchange pictures with one another (inside the message window - not as a separate file)
• Server routing - messages can be stored and forwarded by the server should the target user be off-line
• Cosmetic settings - users can set a font, font style and font size for their text

Screenshots of the application will be provided below