Around the halls of WWDC there's lots for developers to discuss ... and to quip about too. My favorite witticism so far is, "Rendezvous Is French for JXTA."
If you're not sure what JXTA is, well, you're not alone. I sat through an entire presentation a while back, and I'm still not sure myself. To the best of my knowledge, it's the next generation of Jini, a technology developed by Sun that enables data sharing among devices in a localized area.
I do have a good feel for Rendezvous though. Steve Jobs explained it to me yesterday (and a thousand or so Apple developers too). Rendezvous is dynamic discovery among devices via IP networks without user configuration. Yes, that means zero configuration.
"You just want things to discover each other and share information," he said during the keynote at WWDC. The example Steve Jobs used to explain this proposed standard was compelling.
One person has iTunes open and is listening to music. Another person walks in the room with a PowerBook and iTunes open. Both computers discover each other and make their respective music libraries available via AirPort. One person can actually choose to listen to a song on the other's computer, and it is streamed across the AirPort network. When one person leaves the room, the iTunes library goes with that person and disappears from the other's computer.
That's it. I now know more about Rendezvous than I probably will ever know about JXTA. Oh, I guess there's one other difference ... Rendezvous is going to be really big.
Derrick Story is the author of The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers, The Digital Photography Companion, and Digital Photography Hacks, and coauthor of iPhoto: The Missing Manual, with David Pogue. You can follow him on Twitter or visit www.thedigitalstory.com.
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