Re: Gnome VFS - plans for Gnome 2.8

[George Karabin <gkarabin pobox com>]

On Mar 25, 2004, at 3:37 AM, Rodrigo Moya wrote:

> On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 11:19 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
>
> > add mDNS (rendezvous) detected local webdav servers to
> > network:. This means we need mDNS support in gnome-vfs.
> as we talked on IRC, it would also be pretty good to support SLP, which
> seems to fit better in larger networks. We wanted to do, for
> libgnetwork, a single API entry point for all service discovery
> mechanisms (mDNS, SLP, etc). There is a mail (with no answers)  
> proposing
> how to do that:
>
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-network-list/2004-February/ 
> msg00005.html
>
> probably that could be a goosd starting point. Having all that in a
> public API would help in making use of it in all GNOME applications, so
> I guess it's worth the effort.
>
> cheers

Have you looked at UPnP (http://www.upnp.org/)? It looks fairly  
heavyweight, but it's targeted at some of the same sorts of things as  
zeroconf/Rendezvous. I imagine the initial interest in mDNS and webdav  
is for network file sharing. A short and sweet example of how UPnP  
might be used for something similar is MediaServer  
(http://www.upnp.org/standardizeddcps/mediaserver.asp). I'm sure there  
are plenty of others.

If you're thinking about ways to support/abstract different service  
discovery mechanisms, you may want to spare it some thought if you have  
time. There's a library for dealing with it on Linux at  
http://upnp.sourceforge.net/ , and it's in FreeBSD ports as well. The  
docs look fairly impressive, but I've no idea how mature it is (SF says  
it is on the project page, though, FWIW ;)

- George