Re: Bonjour Service implementation on server end

Hi there,

On 17/06/13 10:51, Tor Lillqvist wrote:
>     It seems that Bonjour has some great support for Mac and iOS
>     device so I can search for running mac libreoffice instance on the
>     local network. But I'm not sure if we have some nice c++ native
>     support (and also are there any windows, linux support for
>     Bonjour?) for that since libreoffice is supposed to work
>     cross-platform. 
>
>
> I think the implementation for Linux is called Avahi. Not sure about
> Windows. 

Some notes from last year:
-Initial plan was to use dns-sd/Bonjour/Avahi which seems to be well
supported by most systems.
-This was scrapped since Android doesn't work well with dns-sd (although
newer versions, possibly from 4.0 do apparently have proper support).
-Hence a custom discovery protocol was devised (multicast packets, see
android/sdremote/src/org/libreoffice/impressremote/communication/ServerFinder.java
for an example of the client end).

For future use dns-sd is probably wisest -- especially if one assumes
that Android support for dns-sd will be widespread (i.e. older
incompatible versions no longer used).

W.r.t to actual support for this, as far as I remember it was:
- Bonjour for Mac
- Avahi for Linux
- Bonjour for Windows too, but would require shipping the Bonjour binary
along with LO.

Alternatively there are things like pyZeroConf and jmdns which coud
offer simpler cross-platform support: I have no idea about how usable
these are, but I gather jmdns is the library of choice for accessing
dns-sd records from android (but as mentioned that doesn't work very well).

(I'd be willing to look into the Linux and Windows implementations,
although I probably won't have much time for that until I'm back home /
end of June.)

Cheers,

    Andrzej