Welcome to the Wildebeest homepage. Wildebeest is a new project which aims to produce a CORBA-based peer-to-peer (P2P) network. It is not like other P2P systems: it doesn't share files like Kazza, it shares objects. Of course, an object might be a file, but it might be an interface to a database. It might be a chat server, or a node for routing Voice over IP (VoIP) calls. Because CORBA allows objects to be passed around distributed systems easily and transparently, any service can be traded on the network.

This opens up a whole host of possibilities, and provides a single framework on which many different P2P applications can be built. The eventual aim is for Wildebeest to provide a base platform on which new P2P systems can be rapidly developed and deployed without the overhead of implementing the network infrastructure itself.

Wildebeest will include the ideas of trust and reputation, to allow fair trading on the network. If a user provides a lot of resources to the network, they should have a proportionate reputation among other users. All objects will also be digitally signed, to allow content integrity to be certified. This is the trust part.

The real problem is how these ideas are going to be implemented: there is a long way to go! The initial development is taking place in Java, and using the JacORB open-source CORBA ORB.