I’ve been playing around with some new networking technoglogies (i.e. newer than Berkeley sockets). In no particular order:
- Rendezvous - a simple but effective new technology from Apple. It allows a machine to discover other services on the network through the use of multicast packets broadcast to a well-known multicast group. Breaks service discovery into types and instances so you can either find all types of services on your network, find all instances of a type or a particular instance. It should be noted that this only deals with discovery - the endpoints still must understand how to talk to each other. It is based on an IETF standard (mDNS) and is language-independent.
- JXTA - a much more complicated and powerful technology. JXTA is a p2p-based technology which allows peers to disccover and communicate with each other. It means to be language-independent but is essentially tied to Java right now.
- jini - jini is a distributed network programming foundation for Java. It is a few years old and has pretty much fallen out of favor due to the rise of web services and its heavy dependence on Java.
Rendezvous is very exciting to me. We are starting to see many, if not most, new consumer electronics with some network capability. The ability to discover and manage these devices without some complicated setup will be critical to their success. Tivo has already announced that future Tivos will be Rendezvous aware so that Macs can find and view shows recorded on the Tivo with just a few mouse clicks.
JXTA would make a great foundation for the next P2P application, like Napster or Skype. Microsoft has an equivalent .NET P2P foundation available to developers.