Apple Releases Bonjour for Windows 1.0.3

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."

Comments

Re:I bet network engineers

[truthsearch]

My mac finds network printers with no delay at all and gets the appropriate drivers as needed (the Windows equivalent has sucked ever since they introduced it and it's specific to printers).

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.

What?

[fidget42]

Oh, I don't know? Because Windows has had a full standards-based implementation of ZeroConf for...oh...seven years, so Apple can finally bring a partial, somewhat standards compliant implementation of ZeroConf to Windows users who've had it for the best part of a decade?

According to here, ZeroConf was finished on 2003. If I remember correctly, Apple provided the first ZeroConf implementation for Windows. You might be thinking about uPnP.

Re:I bet network engineers

[aldheorte]

There's a difference between computers and services in a distributed environment (network). DHCP operates at a lower level to get individual computers into the environment with an addressable endpoint (IP address). Computer names provide a poor form of 'fixed' DNS for addressing of packets inside the environment from one machine to the other, commonly used for such things as file sharing when you know you need to connect to the named file server and a particular share on it.

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.