Adopting Bonjour
| As mentioned earlier, Bonjour and Zeroconf implement IP networking without configuration for existing devices as well as new classes of devices or services. Bonjour support in Mac OS X provides simple configuration for home or cafe computing scenarios (where people need to network computers in a coffee shop or bookstore). Examples of applications that take advantage of Bonjour are iChat, iTunes, and iPhoto. Today, most early Bonjour adoption outside of Apple has focused on network printer support. Before Bonjour, network printer manufacturers had to decide whether to include legacy support for AppleTalk to allow easy network configuration, in addition to the expected IP printing support. By supporting Bonjour, printer manufacturers have an alternative way to allow easy network operation. Brother, Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark, and Xerox support Bonjour, often called Zeroconf (on older printers you may also see the name Rendezvous, which is what Apple called it in Mac OS X v10.2 and Mac OS X v10.3). Other manufacturers that have announced Bonjour support are:
Bonjour is ideal for accessing devices that do not include a monitor or keyboard and where the only option for configuration is first accessing the device over a network. Because the manufacturer must provide some initial configuration option, a Bonjour address that is dynamically assigned when the device joins the network would be preferable to a static address that might be incompatible with the network or conflict with an existing network device. Bonjour-enabled devices have the advantage of working on both configured and unconfigured networks because a Bonjour-enabled device can choose an appropriate address and advertise its services to the local subnet. Because many new devices include embedded servers for accessing or updating their software, such as HTTP, FTP, or SSH servers, Bonjour is excellent for locating these devices on the network. |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 258