At 1:46 PM -0700 6/30/04, Brady Duga wrote:
This is an unfortunate opinion. Rendezvous does *not* find devices.
It finds services.
Yes, true -- I only picked on devices because those were the services
touted when Rendezvous was introduced. It was Apple's answer to
"Hey, what happened to AppleTalk, that let me find the printers on my
network so easily?"
In fact, most OS X installations are already advertising services
via Rendezvous, like http and ssh. It is tremendously easy to create
a server in OS X that advertises using Rendezvous. In fact, I am
running a simple http server built in Rb which is doing just that.
Unfortunately, it's not quite as easy for me to find the server in
an Rb client. The same for all the other services I might want to
find (say, ssh).
What is the point of advertising an ssh service? If someone has
business connecting to you by ssh, they must have your address or
network name already (along with a valid user name an password),
right? Or are you going to find any machine on your network and just
try random usernames and passwords to see if it's one you have an
account on? Similarly, why would you want to find a random machine
on the network serving up HTTP and connect to it?
In general, it seems to me that network services come in three flavors:
1. General address-oriented services that need no advertisement, like
http and ssh, because the address is just one bit of information you
need to know to have any use for the service anyway.
2. Custom services, such as an app that talks to other copies of
itself, or apps in a suite that talk to each other. In this case you
define the protocol, and AutoDiscovery is a perfectly valid way to
find the other nodes.
3. Standardized services, such as printers, to which a variety of
3rd-party apps may need to find and connect. Rendezvous is
appropriate here (or on the Windows platform, PnP, which is far more
widely used than Rendezvous and probably will be for quite a while at
least).
I'm sure we can come up with category 3 services which are not
devices, but none are leaping to mind.
At any rate, if you need Rendezvous, use Rendezvous (and perhaps file
a feature request to have that built in -- we'll certainly consider
it). But I suspect that most apps don't need it, because they fall
into category 1 or 2.
Best,
- Joe
--
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| Joseph J. Strout REAL Software, Inc. |
| joe at realsoftware dot com http://www.realsoftware.com |
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