Bonjour to you, too!

Seems I'm a day late to the party, but Apple has actually released Bonjour for Windows.

I've been playing with Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous) on Windows for quite a while longer than I've had a Mac. In fact, a bit under three years ago, when I was at the University of Texas at Dallas, I downloaded Apple's Rendezvous code and built the Rendezvous Browser they had written. I managed to find about four Macs on the local subnet and actually got in contact with the owner of one.

For those who don't know (probably most people), Bonjour is primarily a form of multicast DNS and service advertisement. From Apple's site on it (linked above):

Bonjour is an open protocol which Apple has submitted to the IETF as part of the ongoing standards-creation process. In order to provide a true zero-configuration experience, Bonjour requires that devices implement three essential things. These devices must be able to

- allocate IP addresses without a DHCP server
- translate between names and IP addresses without a DNS server
- locate or advertise services without using a directory server

So essentially, it allows you to throw a bunch of computers together and they'll automatically negotiate their IP addresses, and then start sharing services. Apple's Mac OS X contains a version of Apache as well as a filesharing server that works with Apple Filesharing Protocol, an SSH server, an FTP server, a customized VNC server, and a printer sharing daemon, all of which advertise themselves to the local network. They're all turned off by default, but if you want to use them, they're there in the form of checkboxes in the Sharing pane of the System Preferences. Since they're all Bonjour-enabled, all you need to do is turn on Apache (for instance), and everyone with a Bonjour-enabled browser gets a link to that computer's page.

The printer sharing is the coolest part of this in my mind. Every single major manufacturer of network printers has built Bonjour into their printer firmware now, so all you need to do is plug the printer into your network, and all of your Macs can see it and print to it with no further configuration. With this release, the same ease comes to Windows. KDE is building it into version 3.4, so soon, every major OS is going to have an implementation of it. Hopefully, this is the advent of a new ease-of-use in networking such that anyone can just throw hardware together and it'll talk without any problems.