<p> NIREX Internet Resource EXchange John P. Sanda and Roy P. Pargas Department of Computer Science, Clemson University Clemson, SC 29634 {sandaj, pargas}@cs.clemson.edu</p><p>Abstract Nirex Internet Resource EXchange (NIREX), a dynamic, distributed system built on Jini technology, promotes the convenient exchange of information, both data and programs, among clients on the web. NIREX provides services such as the maintenance of a database of recognized clients, an intermediary service (a referee) which serves to arbitrate between executable content submitted to NIREX, and a dynamic container which holds all submitted files and programs.</p><p>NIREX started out as a system which allows students in a programming class to develop and submit game-playing programs. The system allowed the students to play their game players against other game players. A favorite opponent, of course, was their arch nemesis, namely, the course instructor’s game player. As NIREX developed, however, it became clear that this system could be used in other applications, such as a simple file sharing system among geographically dispersed clients on the web, or as an asynchronous messaging system for clients and services.</p><p>This paper focuses on the gaming service, called GameEngine, which allows users to write game-playing programs that compete against one another. Users' programs are dynamically loaded and unloaded from the system. Competition results are immediately available for viewing on the web. Users may pit their game players against any player currently in the system, and may retrieve their players, i.e., take them out of competition, for improvement. The GameEngine executes client requests on a remote server. It utilizes JavaSpaces as a persistent storage for player programs and a relational database for storing user information and game results. We present the architectural details of GameEngine and the results of using this service to support a game development assignment in a sophomore-level data structures (CS-4) course. We also briefly describe a second NIREX application: a file and document sharing system being developed for a group of middle-school science and math teachers in Anderson County, SC. This application provides teachers with a fast, convenient, and easy way to share work and to collaborate with each other.</p><p>We conclude with future work which includes extending NIREX to provide the development of distributed data structures such as linked lists and binary trees. Such data structures may be used in compute-intensive applications in which distributed processing may provide performance gains.</p>