Automatic service discovery protocols

Question

I am currently looking into a variety of service discovery protocols available to Java and have come up with a small list:

DNS-SD^[1] a.k.a mDNS - implemented by jmDNS and also used as a backend for Zeroconf/Bonjour discovery provider for ECF (Eclipse Communication Framework)
UPnP^[2] - implemented by Cling library
SLP - implemented by OpenSLP and jSLP projects (later is also available as ECF Discovery provider)

There's probably more options, if so, I invite you to add tham to the mix.

I would love to get some objective listings of each protocol's pros and cons from people who have used one or many of these. How does implementation of publishing and discovering a service look like, what is the "chattiness" of the protocol, how reliable is it (both - the protocol and the implementations), does it require centralized service directory or is it p2p/decentralized etc.

Which one would you choose to provide seamless automatic discovery of multiple devices/services on the LAN?

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 04 '10 at 10:16

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jmdns - the underlying algorithms are much simpler than uPnP. Simplicity counts here.

answered Oct 04 '10 at 10:16

Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen

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score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 07 '12 at 18:03

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Although this is old, I will dovetail into the answer that suggested using ZooKeeper.

Netflix released Curator, a framework and client wrapper around ZooKeeper, which includes (among other recipies) a Service Discovery extension.

answered Jun 07 '12 at 18:03

GalacticJello

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered May 12 '11 at 13:39

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Apache ZooKeeper can be used for service discovery as well

answered May 12 '11 at 13:39

Leen Toelen

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Maybe you could edit this answer to include some reasoning behind this choice – Roland Tepp Jul 23 '11 at 14:38

Automatic service discovery protocols

3 Answers3