The latest code in CVS now supports Multicast DNS, which is marketed by Apple as Rendezvous. This means that anyone in a local network can automatically discover the server name and port that Jive Messenger is running on. Because no clients support this protocol yet, it’'s mainly useful for writing custom applications. For anyone interested in playing with this functionality, you may want to try the JMDNS project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jmdns/
Jive Messenger will publish with the type “_xmpp._tcp.local.”.
If this feature turns out to be useful to a lot of people, perhaps we can submit it as a JEP. Note: this is different than what iChat does. In iChat, multicast DNS is used for peer to peer messagin. Jive Messenger’'s usage of the service is just to auto-discover the location of a normal XMPP server.
Matt, this is very cool. mDNS support would allow agents/clients on a subnet to discover the XMPP server. The next step is to support DNS-SD which would allow a client, which may be another XMPP server, to discover the XMPP server in another domain.
One update to my original message. The name is now “xmpp-client” instead of “xmpp” to match the DNS SRV profiles that XMPP uses. I’'m a bit confused what DNS-SD would give us, though. If you have additional details, that would be appreciated.
Matt, DNS-SD provides service discovery beyond the .local domain. In the same way that mDNS allows you to find XMPP server’‘s on your subnet DNS-SD allows you to find XMPP servers in a given domain. For example, you could use it to discover the XMPP servers in the jivesoftware.org domain. DNS-SD also allows you to access services by name rather than hostname/portnumber. If there are two servers, Jivesoftware Public Messenger and Jivesoftware Developer’‘s Messenger, in the jivesoftware.org domain a DNS-SD enabled client, having discovered those names, could just refer to the servers by name. If the hostnames and/or port numbers change there’'s no impact on clients.
The DNS-SD I-D does a better job of explaining it. I think it would be worth your time to check it out.