Mac OS X offers a range of modern, sophisticated, and easy-to-use networking technologies. From the fine-grained control of BSD Sockets, to device discovery with Bonjour, to display of web content with the WebKit-powered Safari web browser, you have many options for accomplishing a wide range of networking tasks. Your application has access to these features through high-level frameworks that make it easy to connect to, render, and interact with information anywhere in the world.
Find Others Using Bonjour
Bonjour is the powerful zero configuration protocol from Apple that makes it easy to find systems and services on a local network automatically. Many services and applications on Mac OS X that have networking capabilities use Bonjour, from printer discovery, to chatting in iChat, to music sharing in iTunes. Bonjour includes a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use, programming interface that is accessible from Cocoa, Ruby, Python and other languages. View developer resources
WebKit Framework
Mac OS X makes it easy to add network capability to your application. The high-level WebKit framework gives you complete control over locally or remotely accessed web content. WebKit makes it easy to render HTML, store cookies, cache responses, store credentials, and authenticate users. Your application can interact with the Web as a first-class information and communication source without having to write a lot of low-level networking or parsing code.
Simplified Network Administration
Mac OS X includes a number of features that make life easier for system administrators. You can easily create disk images that can be deployed over the network. Network Home Directories allow you to centralize data in a machine-independent manner, and access it from different operating systems.
Xsan, Apple’s SAN file system, provides shared storage, optimized for your workload. Xsan is fully integrated into the Spotlight search experience, allowing users to find documents on shared storage just as easily as on local disks.
BSD Sockets
BSD Sockets is the fundamental network programming interface on Mac OS X; all of the higher-level frameworks are based on it. It is a good choice for maximum performance and flexibility. Also, because it is the de-facto standard for UNIX network programming, BSD Sockets is the best choice if you’re porting software from other platforms.
