Apple Releases Bonjour for Windows 1.0.3 195
MacDailyNews is reporting that Apple has released Bonjour for Windows 1.0.3. From the article: "Bonjour, also known as zero-configuration networking, enables automatic discovery of computers, devices, and services on IP networks. Bonjour uses industry standard IP protocols to allow devices to automatically discover each other without the need to enter IP addresses or configure DNS servers."
Re:How is this different than... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bonjour/ [apple.com]
Bonjour is more than just wireless and DHCP. It automatically discovers and configures printers and other network devices without even needing to use a wizard.
Re:How is this different than... (Score:5, Informative)
Xcode uses it to discover which clients on a network it can distribute complies to to speed up the horribly slow GCC.
Re:Don't need it (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Windows 1.0.3? (Score:3, Informative)
You Windows and Linux users are so cute, still living in the '90s, so accustomed to mediocrity. "Has anyone used Bonjour" indeed.
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:5, Informative)
My co-workers' iTunes libraries show up instantly for me to play on my own mac.
iChat with no central server
There are others, but the point is that they all work over the same protocol. No specific network programming is required as long as a device is Bonjour-enabled. It's not the greatest thing since sliced bread but it makes networking easier. With Windows Microsoft prefers to program each device type separately.
Re:Bonjour vs UPnP (Score:5, Informative)
For example, there does not appear to be a profile for something like iChat (Internet Chat), Xcode (Distributed Computing), or Font Sharing. Yet Bonjour enables both of these since the standards bodies do not limit the services.
Re:Wild guess... (Score:4, Informative)
To put it another way, TCP/IP is about transport, DHCP is about configuration, and Bonjour/Zeroconf is about discovery.
What? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:5, Informative)
Services, on the other hand, could exist on any of the computers and Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous) and other service discovery protocols (such as used in Jini) work at this level, looking for particular services without a care of what computer on which they run, or if they changed from one computer to another because that computer got taken offline and replaced by another one. Services could include an iTunes broadcast stream, an iChat presence, or a service that, when called via a program, can return the expected weight of x pairs of jeans, for a totally inane example.
In the iChat example, if you had a coworker moving between machines, you wouldn't know which one to message just by computer name (such as that Messaging Service that Windows NT has where you can send a message to another machine by machine name and it comes up in a dialog window). With Bonjour, wherever your coworker logged in, your iChat would find his identity as a service and know to route your iChats messages to him at his current machine.
Re:How is this different than... (Score:5, Informative)
for those that don't know, bonjour enables a machine to not only broadcast a DNS name for itself ("hey everyone, I'm alberto.local!), but it also the services it offers ("hey, I do ftp, http, and jabber!").
When it first became available I was pretty vocal about how I could get the same thing done with host files... but as I've gotten older and the number of machines on my network have grown, it's become a lot easier to access the OSX machines without needing to know their IPs, and configuring the host files of my 4 linux servers is a pain in the ASS.
This is also available for linux, but I haven't gotten it working properly (or really tried, for that matter). I believe the packages are called Howl and mdnsResponder.
Re:How is this different than... (Score:4, Informative)
I have a Fedora Core 4 system that advertises Netatalk shares and HTTP via mDNSresponder. Fedora 5 has dropped Howl in favor of Avahi [avahi.org] -- another zeroconf implementation -- though I haven't done anything with it yet.
Challenge? (Score:4, Informative)
Novell has historically not been strong on IP networking; more recently they've figured out that IP is the way to go, but I haven't heard of any cross-platform, open-standard, widely-supported IP-network technology from them. Or from Microsoft, for that matter. (How many UPNP printers can you name?)
Has anyone used Bonjour?
Only pretty much every Mac [apple.com] user (Safari, iTunes, iPhoto, iChat,
What's network traffic like? ActiveDirectory and Novell are both rather chatty applications when it comes to the network.
It uses caching, duplicate message suppression, and exponential backoff. Traffic is unnoticably light.
If we can find a way to keep things quiet, this is a great idea. However, there's the challenge.
Good thing those engineers at Apple figured it out 5 years ago, then!
Zeroconf is the only service of its type that I've heard of. It's certainly the only one that runs on pure-IP networks, whose standard is open [zeroconf.org], which has multiple independent implementations [wikipedia.org], which has support from both proprietary [apple.com] and open-source [avahi.org] camps, and is supported out-of-the-box by many major hardware manufacturers [apple.com]. If there's any competition in this area, I don't know what it is.
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:3, Informative)
So, right now, you are better off building Bonjour into your products. You can negnotiate a license to distribute Bonjour with your app from Apple.
Re:Don't need it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I bet network engineers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How is this different than... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, if you count the hidden Wide-Area Bojour [dns-sd.org] stuff you're up to '89.
AppleTalk, we missed 'ya.
Doesn't gtet much simpler than this (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Internet Explorer??? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, it's incredibly useful. There are a boatload of appliances that you plug into your network nowadays that have web servers built-in to them. For instance, everybody has a firewall/NAT appliance nowadays. What if you got to the configuration page simply by finding it in a menu in your browser rather than having to either guess or look up the default IP address?