It’s already widely known that everyone’s favorite peer to peer (P2P) application for PC and Mac, Limewire, is soon going to offer an online store, where you’ll be able to buy and download songs and albums in MP3 format at a selected fee. Here’s the press release in case you missed the story back in August. Initially the site was supposed to Beta in fall and be up for the holidays but it seems the project has been somewhat delayed.
The good news is that Limewire is very likely to be fitted with a browser (which you can test out in the latest Beta released yesterday), as we can read on the latest post by the developers. As they explain, the idea has been around for a while, and right now the real challenge is choosing what browser to integrate to the Limewire client, the purpose being the following,
With the launch of the LimeWire Store, we wanted to be able to search the Store through the LimeWire client and the easiest way to achieve this was to integrate a web browser into the client.
Initially the idea was to use a Java Desktop Integration Component (JDIC) browser, but unfortunately Sun, the developer of the browser, seems to have let go of the project since August 2006. The Limewire team have weighed up the solutions and found IBM’s Eclipse to work out best. It does get more technical, so I’ll spare you the details, except to say that the Limewire team worked on building a browser in SWT (used to make Eclipse) which could be embedded in the Swing built Limewire client.
The question now is: Will fitting Limewire with a browser kill what is a simple and easy to use P2P client, by considerably increasing its memory usage and bloating it with features? Or will both the browser and the online store prove to be a real asset to the Limewire resource?
[Via: P2P Blog]
