Xus Milestone 1 complete

According to my only somewhat extensive automated tests, Milestone 1 (Basic Xus) is now complete. That includes layers 1 and 2 and the property service (transient and persistent properties). Plexus relies heavily on its property service (currently backed by FreePastry) and I think it will be useful to other programs as well. It's kind of a persistent broadcast; it's really just for relatively small databases, like if you have to track a few hundred things for the topic, like player locations in a game or account credit, for instance. Plexus uses properties for player presence (nickname, which world they're connected to, etc.) and object information (location, orientation, costume, etc.) If you need to store large amounts of data, it might be appropriate to use the file storage service (coming soon and featuring optional Git integration) or maybe to add a database service (and contributing it back to the project would be nifty, too). DHT message routing is useful for this sort of thing, so you don't necessarily have to replicate all the data to all of the peers if you are storing a large amount.

When a peer successfully joins a topic, the topic owner sends it the current property values. Peers broadcast property settings or deletions to the topic and the topic owner keeps track of the properties for when new members join. This creates a very simple (some might even say simplistic) database for each topic. It's just key-value pairs of strings (like in Java's Properties object).

When you set a property, you specify whether the setting should be persistent. If a peer has storage turned on, persistent properties are stored in an XML file so that they are there next time the peer starts up. It usually only important for topic owners to store persistent properties, because other peers always get the latest properties for a topic when they connect to it (and they may have changed since the peer was last connected anyway).