Bonjour, formerly Rendezvous, is Apple's trade name for its implementation of the IETF Zeroconf protocol - a computer network technology used in Apple's Mac OS X from version 10.2 onwards. It uses standard DNS packets in a new way. Thus it is a new service, but it is using a technology that is relatively old, DNS over IP. This work is copyrighted. ... Apple Computer, Inc. ... A trade name, also known as a trading name or a business name, is the legal name of a business, or the name which a business trades under for commercial purposes. ... The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is charged with developing and promoting Internet standards. ... Zeroconf or Zero Configuration Networking is the name for a set of technologies to allow two or more computers to communicate with each other without any external configuration. ... A computer network is a system for communication among two or more computers. ... Mac OS X is the latest version of the Mac OS, the operating system software for Macintosh computers. ... The Domain Name System or DNS is a system that stores information about host names and domain names in a kind of distributed database on networks, such as the Internet. ... In economics and marketing, a service is the non-material equivalent of a good. ... Technology (Gr. ... The Internet Protocol (IP) is a data-oriented protocol used by source and destination hosts for communicating data across a packet-switched internetwork. ...

Bonjour is a general method to discover services on a local area network. This technology is widely used throughout Mac OS X and allows users to setup a network without any configuration. Currently it is used by Mac OS X to find printers and file sharing servers. It is also used by iTunes to find shared music, iPhoto to find shared photos, iChat to find other local iChat users, TiVo Desktop to find digital video recorders, and SubEthaEdit to find document collaborators. Additionally it is used by Safari to find local web servers and configuration pages for local devices. A local area network (LAN) is a computer network covering a local area, like a home, office or small group of buildings such as a college. ... Screenshot of Mac OS X version of iTunes The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... iChat is a AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and Jabber client for Mac OS X. Using a Jabber-like protocol and Apple Bonjour for user discovery, it also allows for LAN communication. ... The TiVo personal video recorder is a consumer video component allowing users to capture television programming to internal hard drive storage. ... A SubEthaEdit Extreme Programming session SubEthaEdit is a collaborative text editor designed for Mac OS X. The collaboration is document based and is non-locking and non-blocking. ... Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Computer, Inc. ...

Without special DNS configuration, Bonjour only works on a single subnet, which is usually a small area. In communications or computer systems, a configuration is an arrangement of functional units according to their nature, number, and chief characteristics. ... The word subnetwork has two related meanings. ...

There seems to be a misperception that a service made available over Bonjour is "on the Internet", or available to the world-wide users of the IP network known as the Internet. This is not true. Bonjour does not provide access to services, it merely advertises them to the users on the same subnet, be it Ethernet, AirPort, or FireWire IP-based, which usually encompasses a fairly small area. The security impact of Bonjour is that it in advertising a service, it is no longer protected by security through obscurity within that subnet. If the services are protected through a means other than obscurity they will remain protected. Ethernet (this name comes from the physical concept of ether) is a frame-based computer networking technology for local area networks (LANs). ... A 6-Pin Firewire 400 connector FireWire (also known as i. ... The Internet Protocol (IP) is a data-oriented protocol used by source and destination hosts for communicating data across a packet-switched internetwork. ... In cryptography and computer security, security through obscurity (sometimes security by obscurity) is a controversial principle in security engineering, which attempts to use secrecy (of design, implementation, etc. ...

Rendezvous was renamed Bonjour with the release of Mac OS X v10.4 due to a 2004 settlement between Apple and Tibco Software Inc. Tibco already marketed a product with the name Rendezvous. It was widely rumored in 2004 that the new name would be OpenTalk, but this name was not picked (possibly due to the similarities to LocalTalk and PowerTalk). Tiger unleashed reads this promotional web ad by Apple Mac OS X version 10. ... 2004 is a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... TIBCO Software Inc. ... LocalTalk is a particular implementation of the physical layer of the AppleTalk networking system from Apple Computer. ... Apple Open Collaboration Environment, or AOCE (sometimes OCE), was a collection of messaging-related technologies introduced for the Mac OS in the early 1990s. ...

Bonjour services are largely implemented at the application level using standard TCP/IP calls, rather than in the operating system. Although Mac OS X provides various Bonjour services, Mac OS X is not actually required to use Bonjour. Apple has made available an open source implementation of the Bonjour mDNS (multicast DNS) responder (the core component of service discovery), and has released a closed source set of servies for Microsoft Windows. Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... The text below is generated by a template, which has been proposed for deletion. ... Microsoft Windows is a range of closed source proprietary commercial operating environments for personal computers and servers. ...

See also

• Universal plug-and-play
• Service Location Protocol
• Concurrent programming

Universal plug-and-play (UPnP) is a set of computer network protocols promulgated by the UPnP Forum. ... The Service Location Protocol (SLP) allows computers and other devices to find services in a local area network without prior configuration. ... Parallel programming (also concurrent programming), is a computer programming technique that provides for the execution of operations concurrently, either within a single computer, or across a number of systems. ...

External links

• Bonjour - Networking, simplified (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bonjour/) - general information from Apple
• Bonjour developer website (http://developer.apple.com/macosx/rendezvous/index.html) - developer resources from Apple
• Stuart Cheshire and Rendezvous mentioned on Daniel Smith's weblog on the O'Reilly Network (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3137)
• Bonjour for Windows (http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/bonjourforwindows_readme.html) - Closed source Bonjour services from Apple for Windows 2000/2003/XP
• Understanding Zeroconf and Multicast DNS on the O'Reilly Network (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2002/12/20/zeroconf.html) - An introduction to zero configuration networking, including a comparision between Bonjour/Zeroconf and Universal Plug 'n' Play