Apple may develop new Bonjour networking protocol standard

PanARMENIAN.Net - Apple is interested in developing a new standard related to its Bonjour networking protocol, The Next Web reported.

The company joined in on an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting to discuss creating a group to improve its standard, which is based on Multicast DNS.

The new working group would presumably be called MDNS Extensions or MDNSext.

On a support page for the protocol, Apple describes Bonjour as “networking technology… that makes it easy to set up and use devices and services on a network.” Its advantage is that it’s designed to take “zero configuration” to setup. Bonjour was actually originally called Rendezvous, but Apple was forced to change the name in 2005 because of a trademark claim.

Apple networking engineer Stuart Cheshire said that Bonjour “has become very popular” in the last 10 years, but customers are looking to do more with it.

University and enterprise networks in particular are lobbying Apple for improvements to Bonjour. A petition from this summer gathered 761 signatures from academic and research institutions asking for the company for wider support across IP subnets and improved security.

The group will reportedly meet in March 2013 to continue work on the standard. Partners like Xirrus, Check Point and IBM have already voiced support for a new standard protocol.