Hi.  I'm the founder of the Ripple project.  Nice to see Ripple being discussed as a real-time transaction overlay for Bitcoin.  I think the two are complementary -- Bitcoin is decentralized virtual gold, and Ripple is decentralized virtual banking. 

I'm working on a generic Ripple server to support the next version of Ripplepay.com that I intend to release as open source.  It won't be distributed at first, but it would work as a central server to query for routes (and also to process transactions atomically, which is probably actually a harder problem than routing in a distributed setup).  My design for a distributed Ripple protocol is here:

http://ripple-project.org/Protocol/Protocol05

Comments and suggestions are welcome.  If anyone is interested in helping with this, or just interested in implementing some kind of Bitcoin banking on top of it, let me know.

Thanks,
Ryan