[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] networking questions & requests

[From: Justin Bradford]

On 6/10/05, Matt Croydon <mcroydon at gmail.com> wrote:
> Of course a nice integration of Zeroconf + D-BUS would be ideal.

Exactly. If it was built-in and any app could make use of relevant
services, it could make the 770 a truly astounding little device.
Besides the existing services an app could make use of, maemo/Nokia
could define some standard services for highly mobile (potentially
light-weight) devices.

As I mentioned earlier, a "print this document" service that could
handle, say RTF, plain text, and PNG (and maybe more complex formats).
Once such services were running on printers/print servers (a very
simple daemon to write for print servers), then any app could offer
print options. Click print, a dialog pops up: here are some printers
on the network [a list obtained via some simple call like
osso_query_zeroconf(..., "org.maemo.print-document", ...)]. And then
the application would merely need to send its data (text, RTF, PNG,
etc) off to the network service. Any maemo app could offer print with
minor additions. Maybe even as little as a dozen lines of code. It
would need some Win/Mac/Linux daemon (which are all simple to write)
in support, but it could become a de facto standard in time.

File server services could be integrated into GnomeVFS and simply show
up as a new folder/device.

Auto-discovery and browsing of iTunes shares. (Althougth maybe Apple
has encrypted/obfuscated the browsing protocol -- I'm not sure. I bet
Nokia could talk them into a proprietary binary plugin to incorporate
into their custom GnomeVFS, however.)

And far crazier things: with ad hoc networks and maemo hosted
services, you could do things like "public information" passing.
Perhaps I downloaded a variety of RSS feeds before I left for the
airport. While I'm sitting and waiting to board, some nearby maemo (or
whatever device, if they support this hypothetical service) notices I
have some news on my device (or vice versa) and then can retrieve
items of interest.

The point being that lots of cool stuff can be down with
auto-discovered network services. Pretty much any application could
conceivably benefit, if a relevant service existed. Apple has
zeroconf/Rendezvous services already out there, so it makes sense to
build on that infrastructure.

And rather than expecting the community of maemo app developers to
settle on a consensus solution (initially everyone doing it
themselves, which will eventually lead to conflicting applications,
then some competing shared solutions, etc), it would be better to have
maemo itself define a zeroconf solution. A daemon (perhaps which
gets/sends notices only if some application has the network up
already, to avoid using the battery draining networking bits without
the user's consent) and then dispatches them appropriately to
(potentially not yet running applications) via DBUS.