Apple's Rendezvous: What it is and why it matters

AnchorDesk

Apple's Rendezvous: What it is and why it matters

Stephan Somogyi
Contributor, AnchorDesk
Wednesday, August 28, 2002

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TCP/IP won the network protocol wars for a vast number of reasons. Unfortunately, user friendliness was not one of them. Those of us lucky enough to use AppleTalk know that networking doesn't have to be hard. While Apple's original LocalTalk network speeds of 230.4kbps were rather feeble by today's standards, AppleTalk's ease of use has remained unavailable in today's TCP/IP-centric nets.

Until now. With the release of Rendezvous, Apple is bringing AppleTalk's ease of use to any TCP/IP network, and not just networks with Macs on them.

BACK IN THE OLD DAYS you could, for example, plug an AppleTalk-savvy printer into a network, turn it on, and (once it warmed up), have it available to everyone on the net. No one--not even the network administrator--needed to know or configure its network address. Printing tools on client machines queried the printer to find out what make and model it was, and thus could print to it correctly.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of ease of use that Rendezvous brings to TCP/IP networks.

While AppleTalk was great for a large number of reasons, it did have its technical shortcomings. These stemmed from its designers' original focus on local networks. One of AppleTalk's main problems was that it was chatty, generating more protocol-related network traffic than many network administrators liked. It also didn't scale as well as TCP/IP when network-to-network interconnectivity started growing quickly.

BECAUSE IT'S TCP/IP-based and because its designers are all too aware of AppleTalk's flaws, Rendezvous is unlikely to suffer from the same problems.

Many of AppleTalk's abilities have been added to TCP/IP piecemeal over the years, but Rendezvous makes them into a more coherent whole that in many cases improves upon the existing TCP/IP-based alternatives. For example, TCP/IP requires that a server running DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) dole out IP addresses to machines on the local network. Rendezvous, by contrast, doesn't need a server; if there's no DHCP server to be found, machines assign themselves non-conflicting IP addresses and get on with it.

Some may dismiss Rendezvous as a proprietary landgrab by Apple. But I think such cynicism is completely unwarranted. While Rendezvous is, indeed, an Apple trademark, its technology is known in network engineering circles as Zeroconf. It's entirely vendor neutral. Apple provides developer information of its own because Rendezvous is part of the just-released 10.2 version of Mac OS X, but that certainly doesn't mean that there's anything Mac-specific about it.

Indeed, when Apple announced Rendezvous, it paraded Epson, HP, and Lexmark around as companies who were going to Rendezvous-enable their printing products. So far, however, HP and Lexmark have been remarkably silent about their specific Rendezvous plans. But I don't think that silence implies anything bad about Apple or Rendezvous.

I DO THINK that manufacturers who adopt Rendezvous early will reap considerable benefits among their customers. Making TCP/IP easy to use is a major selling point. I would vastly prefer to have the machines talk amongst themselves and sort out their network issues on their own, rather than requiring me to keep a list of all those IP addresses and painstakingly parcel them out.

Apple also understands that Rendezvous's proliferation is in everyone's interest. As a result, by the time you read this, Apple tells me that it will have released Rendezvous source code, presumably under the Apple Public Source License. This means that a reference implementation is now available in source form for others to use in adding Rendezvous support to their operating systems, peripherals, and other devices.

Apple has spent considerable effort and resources of its own to develop Zeroconf. With its release, both integrated into Jaguar and as source code for all to see, Rendezvous is something that everyone on a TCP/IP network can take advantage of. The big remaining question is which other companies will support it, and when. Windows XP, for example, is touted as having increased network location awareness. But, absent evidence to the contrary, this probably refers to Windows's NetBIOS-based capabilities.

We can only hope that Microsoft--and others--will see the value of Zeroconf, and follow Apple's lead in making TCP/IP networks as easy to use as AppleTalk networks have been for decades.

What do you think? Will Rendezvous make your life easier? TalkBack to me!

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