Question

My networking experience to date is pretty much nil. I did some theory in college but very little hands on experience. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading up on IOS networking APIs and on more fundamental topics such as tcp /udp /dns etc.

I’m slowly beginning to absorb the information but before I venture further down my current path I’d like to know if Im looking in the right area for my purposes.

I have a hardware device that can be connected to my local network. I know for sure that others have wrote code to control this device via wifi (osc commands)from their ipads.

Now my question:

Is bonjour appropriate for this type of connection or is it only really appropriate for publish / subscribe applications?

It would help a lot to know if I’m wasting my time with bonjour or not. Also any concrete reading material on tcp connections between IOS and networked hardware would help a lot (my google search criteria is lacking due to my lack of knowledge)

Answer 1

First of all lets understand what Bonjour is basically:
Bonjour is Apple’s proposal for zero-configuration networking over IP. Bonjour comes out of the work of the ZEROCONF Working Group, part of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The ZEROCONF Working Group’s requirements and proposed solutions for zero-configuration networking over IP essentially cover three areas:

• Addressing (allocating IP addresses to hosts)
• Naming (using names to refer to hosts instead of IP addresses)
• Service discovery (finding services on the network automatically)

So basically Bonjour makes it easy for your applications to publish, discover, and resolve network services. There is nothing more you can do with Bonjour. Rest, the communication with other device(s), you need to handle that using Sockets(TCP Connection).

So in simple words, there is no question of appropriate or not-appropriate for hardware.

Note: Bonjour only discovers devices on same network or same LAN.