---

Introduction to Bonjour Overview

Contents:

Organization of This Document
See Also

Part of Mac OS X’s Bonjour zero-configuration networking architecture is a powerful new system for publishing and discovering services on an IP network. This system finally brings simplicity and ease-of-use together with the power of TCP/IP network services.

This document gives a high level overview of how Bonjour works. It is not meant as a programming guide. Instead, this document covers the architecture of Bonjour and gives an overview of the different Application Layer Interfaces (APIs) that are available.

Organization of This Document

This document contains the following articles:

• “About Bonjour” describes the problems that Bonjour solves and how it solves them.

• “Domain Naming Conventions” explains Internet domains names, the Bonjour local domain, and the naming rules for Bonjour services instances and services types.

• “Bonjour Operations” describes the architecture for service publication browsing.

• “Bonjour API Architecture” describes the three network service API layers.

See Also

• DNS Service Discovery Programming Guide describes the Bonjour API appropriate for Darwin and Windows programmers and developers.

• NSNetServices and CFNetServices Programming Guide describes the Bonjour API appropriate for Cocoa programmers and C and C++ programmers on Mac OS X.

---