Cocoa in a Nutshell

Rendezvous Network Services

Rendezvous is Apple’s implementation of zero-configuration networking (Zeroconf). Introduced with the Jaguar release of Mac OS X, Rendezvous brings AppleTalk’s ease of use to standard IP networking. This gives the user the ability to browse for printing, file sharing, or any other IP-based services much as was done with the Chooser in earlier versions of the Mac OS.

Tip

For more information on Rendezvous networking, see Apple’s Rendezvous developer page at http://developer.apple.com/macosx/rendezvous/, or visit the Zeroconf working group web site at http://www.zeroconf.org.

Foundation provides access to Rendezvous’ low-level APIs through the classes NSNetService and NSNetServiceBrowser. An application registers, or publishes, a service on the network by using NSNetService. The class NSNetServiceBrowser searches for and discovers services that are registered elsewhere. This section provides an overview of how these classes fit into an application.

NSNetService

NSNetService represents a network service that applications either publish or use as a client. A network service can be FTP, Telnet, SSH, HTTP, or something of your own design.

The Picture Sharing application included with the Foundation example code found in the Developer Tools installation (/Developer/Examples/Foundation/PictureSharing) is an example of a custom Rendezvous service. This example has two applications: a server application that publishes a picture sharing service and a client application ...