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These pages are intended to give a top-down overview of Fred's architecture. Before reading this you should become familiar with Freenet's architecture by reading this paper. If you require more detailed information than is provided here you should refer to the Javadocs that are part of Fred's source code.
At the simplest level, Fred is a piece of software which people can run on their computer which will allow them to both request from, and insert information into, a global information store, while allowing their computer to form a part of that store. To request or insert a piece of information a key is required, such keys are somewhat analogous to a URL for a piece of information on the world wide web. Freenet does not guarantee that it will find a piece of information, even if it exists on the network, but it is reliable enough to be very useful for a diverse number of applications.
To contribute to the freenet project, you don't have to hack java on fred. There's an easy to use interface to the java node called the FreenetClientProtocol that allows an external program to do inserts and requests.
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