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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Wednesday, July 07, 2004

Rendezvous with the Desktop

OFB: "Those who know me know I love the concept and the actual implementation of networking technology known as Zeroconf. Apple premiered the technology under the name "Rendezvous" in Mac OS X Jaguar 10.2 approximately two years ago, and released the basic libraries and tools needed to implement Rendezvous on POSIX compatible systems under the Apple Public Source License (APSL). Last year, things became even rosier after Apple worked with the Free Software Foundation to create the APSL 2.0 license which meets the requirements necessary to be considered a Free Software license ... Rendezvous networking, at its heart, provides three things: automatic IP assignment without a DHCP server, name resolution without a DNS server and advertising available services without a directory server. For those not familiar with it, let me give you an example. I recently added a new Hewlett-Packard Rendezvous enabled wireless 802.11b printer to my office. After running the web based setup to configure the printer with the network's WPA preshared key, the printer's name automatically appeared on every Mac on our network. Furthermore, if I open up Safari's bookmarks, and look under the Rendezvous section, the printer's administration page is automatically listed ... If you've seen iPhoto '04 or iTunes sharing functionality, you have also seen Rendezvous at work. While SMB networks are suppose to work somewhat like this, they often seem to work rather unreliably. Rendezvous not only goes a step further than past, similar ideas, it also does it far more reliably."

Zeroconf looks awesome, but my only fear is that Rendezvous won't see huge adoption on the Windows side, especially with network-attached hardware devices. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what this is, but it seems like UPnP done right.

[ Posted at 7:54 AM | Permalink ]