Stuart Cheshire, Ph.D., Senior Engineer, Apple
Track: Emerging Topics
Date: Monday, July 26
Time: 1:45pm - 5:15pm
Location: Portland
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Rendezvous: It's not just for Macs anymore. What does it do, how does it
work?
Since Rendezvous's debut in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, Apple's open source
implementation of zero configuration IP networking has been implemented
on Windows, Linux, BSD, and other operating systems, as well as by every
major network printer and other device manufacturers. Rendezvous makes
device and service discovery instant and automatic, and since it is
standards-based and open source, can be simply and freely implemented in
anything on an IP network.
* Learn more about the technology and it's future.
* Learn how to install and use Multicast DNS and DNS Service Discovery
(aka Rendezvous) on your Linux/FreeBSD/etc. box.
* Learn how to use the Rendezvous APIs to advertise and browse for
services from your own software.
* Case study of how CUPS adopted Rendezvous
* Understand how Rendezvous relates to (or competes with) alternatives
like SLP, JXTA, Jini, and Microsoft's UPnP.
* Find out how Rendezvous can allow you to make better software and
better hardware.
Cheshire has been involved with Zeroconf from the very beginning, and
before. He championed the cause of zero configuration networking in the
1990s, co-chaired the initial 'Networking In the Small'
Birds-Of-a-Feather sessions at the IETF, and then co-chaired the
subsequent Zeroconf working group from inception until 2003. Dr Cheshire
is the author behind the Internet Drafts that specify the protocols, and
has done his fair share of actual implementations too.
Many people assume that Zeroconf (or "Rendezvous" as Apple calls it) is a
Mac-only technology. It's not. It runs everywhere, and all the current
evidence indicates that it's surviving and thriving despite stiff
competition. The fact is that:
* Rendezvous/Zeroconf is open source
* Rendezvous/Zeroconf runs today on Linux, *BSD, etc.,
* and -- often with no more than a few minutes of programming effort --
Rendezvous/Zeroconf can dramatically simplify almost any software or
hardware that uses networking.
There's almost no networking hardware or software that doesn't benefit
from using Rendezvous/Zeroconf.
* If your software currently has any kind of UI for users to type in a
host name or IP address to connect to, then Rendezvous/Zeroconf can
enhance your software by adding a pull-down menu next to that text field,
so users have the additional option of picking from a menu of choices,
instead of having to remember the right name and type it by hand.
* If your software currently accepts incoming TCP connections for almost
any reason, then it can use Rendezvous/Zeroconf to advertise those
services, for clients to discover and display in their pull-down menus.
In short, if your sofware calls connect() or listen(), then it's a
candidate for Rendezvous. Come and learn how you too can become part of
the Rendezvous revolution.
