Writing a bittorent enabled java application
August 26th, 2007
The type of traffic distribution on the Internet today is quite different from the type you might have encountered only a few years ago. In the past, the vast majority of internet bandwidth was used to transfer character streams (in most cases HTML) over either HTTP or HTTPS. This trend has changed over the past few years, with a great deal of bandwidth (33 to 50 percent by some estimates) now being used to distribute large files over peer-to-peer connections. BitTorrent is one of the more popular protocols being used for peer-to-peer file transfers, and enabling your Java applications to use this protocol has never been easier.
In this article I will describe a very useful program: GNU Screen. Usually this program is used by people who have a shell account on a Unix server. But it can be also helpful to people who haven’t yet started to use a terminal or even Linux/Unix at all. Screen — simply — is a program which enables users to create more system shells without the need of logging in multiple times. Moreover it allows to leave programs running after you’ve logged out. What can it be useful for? For example to continue compiling or downloading something when someone wants to use the computer, or to run more than one terminal for one ssh connection. There are many more possible ways of using it… 
“In this article I’d like to describe a text-mode Bittorrent client - rTorrent. It will be helpful to people that share a computer with other household members because it allows them to download files regardless of the logged in user. What’s more, because it is a text-mode client (runs under 