The p2pWeb Model: A Glue for the Web

We foresee promising cross-fertilizations of peer-to-peer and Web models in the next years. Although both models are already influencing each other, there is still a lack of seamless integration between them in order to achieve constructive synergies. In this paper, we present a p2pWeb infrastructure which interconnects a network of Web servers through a novel hierarchical distributed hash table called H-Symphony. We show why the hierarchical approach outperforms the traditional flat designs in terms of content and path locality. Furthermore, our approach offers a seamless integration with Web technologies and creates a novel infrastructure for information distribution, data dissemination and query systems. Our proposed proof of concept application is framed in a known open source project called Moodle: A virtual campus Web application used in thousands of Universities and Learning Institutions around the world. We have developed an extension of Moodle that aims to interconnect all the Moodle sites in the Internet using our p2pWeb infrastructure.