Hans Muller's Blog

March 2005 Archives

A Desktop Java "Killer Application"

It's been a while since I've contributed a blog. It's not for lack of thinking about it. The inspiration for pounding out some purple prose about developments around java desktop software has flowed from my brain to the tips of my fingers half a dozen times of the past month or so. For one reason or another I've set aside the the urge to write each time. It gets easier and easier to do so, until there's some twisted satisfaction in just coming up with a topic that might have made a good blog entry. There's no need to actually write anything, now that my brain has begun equating a brief personal visit with a promising idea with the satisfaction of actually writing about it. This is starting feel dangerously close to solipsism and so, in an effort to ward off incipient madness, I'm going to wade back into the blogosphere.

Here in the Java client department, we used to have to put up with the occasional harangue about the lack of a "killer application". The harangue would always begin in a patronizing tone, conceding that, oh yes, there are tens of thousands of desktop Java applications for all kinds of specialized tasks and specialized people. What we're not seeing out there, from our elevated perspective (they'd continue), is just one gigantically successful, widely used, everyone has just got to have it, killer application. The usual response to this kind of tirade was to tick off a list of applet games, or collaboration tools like QNext or Elluminate, or - and this was always the coup de grace - Limewire.

A year ago, at about 150 thousand downloads a week, the Limewire (GNUtella) file sharing application was a pretty respectable killer application. It's been listed on download.com for about 18 months and for most of that time it's been among the top 10 or so. Now it's number two.

Limewire's popularity, measured in terms of number downloads or the number of active GNUtella nodes, has been growing steadily. In terms of downloads, the application is now up to about 1.4 million a week. That's a lot. At the moment (per the stats on download.com), it's about 3X WinZip, 10X RealPlayer, and about 20X Windows XP Service Pack 2. Limewire's popularity can be attributed to a variety of things, including great performance, an easy to use Swing GUI, and the lack of any kind of co-bundled spyware or ham-fisted registry busting installer. I think it's fair to guess that the demise of BitTorrent listing sites like SuperNova didn't hurt either. However the BitTorrent "network" has hardly gone away and our own Supreme Court is puzzling over the merits of file sharing as I write this. I hope that they'll find that the good force balances the dark side.

If you haven't given this application a try, check it out at http://www.limewire.com or download.com. The very usable GUI features a custom Swing look and feel that supports skins and has been localized for more than a dozen languages. Startup is fast, and the app automatically "swarm" downloads from multiple GNUtella nodes when that's possible. Limewire is open source so if you're a developer you may want to visit http://www.limewire.org/. Or just join the millions of people who just use it.

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