I’v made some progress. mDNSResponder, which provides the underlying ZeroConf functionalities, has been ported to Haiku. It runs on Haiku correctly. In order to make it run, minor updates in our network stack were also applied.
I’m currently working on the service browser. It is almost finished. I’m also trying to write some wrapper classes so developers who need ZeroConf features can easily use them. And my mentor Axel is working on an update to our DNS resolver. After the update we will write some code that can resolve “.local” domains. So in the future you can directly type “http://webserver.local/" in your Web browser. Without any configuration it will resolve it and take you there.
My name is Ma Jie, And Jie is my given name. I'm a senior college student from China. Although not majored in Computer Science, I still love to do computer programming in my spare time. I have a National Computer Rank Examination certificate on computer network technology and got third prize of a national Java programming competition. The PoorMan server of Haiku is my first contribution to the open source world. I learned a lot from it, and I think it's time to contribute my knowledge back.
Project idea information
Project title
Implementing ZeroConf support for Haiku with mDNSResponder
List of project goals
porting mDNSResponder to Haiku
a mDNSResponder configuration preflet, which can be integrated into the network preflet in the future
a services browser and notifier, which may be integrated into the Deskbar
making PoorMan server utilize the ZeroConf network
writing test cases and running the tests
Project description
There are two major implementations of zero configuration networking, Avahi and Apple's Bonjour. mDNSResponder is the underlying component of Bonjour. There are several reasons for me to choose mDNSResponder as the Haiku's ZeroConf engine. First, as Avahi is mainly designed for linux and BSDs, it uses GNU Autotools, while mDNSResponder uses handmade makefiles. Since Haiku's build system consists of a lot of Jamfiles, mDNSResponder will be easier to integrate into the source tree. Second, Avahi lacks porting directions. Finally, Haiku prefers Apache license that is more compatible with Haiku's MIT license to LGPL.
There may be some difficulties when porting mDNSResponder to Haiku, because the cross platform support is abandoned and some gcc incompatible codes was added to the sources. I need to fix the broken codes during the porting procedure. mDNSResponder will run like other Haiku components. A server runs in the background and clients that want to use the ZeroConf services can communicate with the server by a library.
