Subject: Some general questions

From: "Bill Skiba" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 09:12:39 -0500

I've only recently become aware of the existence of SLP, and am currently
studying the RFC and draft documents to determine its applicability to a
project my company is doing for a client.  I have some general questions
that someone might be able to shed some light on.  I know that these
questions should also be directed to other parties, but I thought I'd post
them here to try to get a broader perspective:

Have there been any implementations of SLP that I could use to get started
in developing demo-level applications to help evaluate the technology?  For
example, is there sample code for DA's, SA's and/or UA's?  I see there's a
draft for an API definition - is this based on an available implementation?
Is there any known commercial support in the embedded world (e.g. ISI's pSOS
or Wind River VxWorks)
for developing SA's, or would we be pretty much on our own developing code
from scratch?

What is the relationship, if any, between SLP and the Sun's Jini technology?
Although I know very little about the details of Jini, its device discovery
capability seems to be quite similar to SLP in many respects.  Does Jini use
SLP, or are they 'competitors'?

What is the relationship between SLP, Appletalk and IPX/SPX (and Novell's
networking products)?  It seems like SLP is intended to provide an open and
standardized way to do some things in the TCP/IP family that already exist
in the IPX/SPX and Appletalk worlds.

What is the relationship between SLP and the Salutation architecture?  The
Salutation consortium evidently has said that SLP fits within their
architecture, but it isn't clear exactly what this means or how it would
work.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 08:03:23 -0800

>in the IPX/SPX and Appletalk worlds.

I can answer a part of this question -- the part about AppleTalk and SLP.
Yes, one of the purposes of SLP is certainly to bring AppleTalk-like
dynamic browsing to IP-based services.  In fact Apple was instrumental in
starting the SLP effort almost 10 years ago now (I know, since I was part
of that group at Apple at the time).

Mac OS 8.5 includes an implementation of SLP v1.  We here at Open Door
utilize that implementation to add dynamic browsing (point-and-click)
support to IP-based Macintosh file sharing through our ShareWay IP 2.0 and
AFP Engage! product lines.  In this way we feel we make IP-based file
sharing as easy as AppleTalk-based file sharing.  Details are at
http://www.opendoor.com/ShareWay/

Let me know if you have any other questions about SLP and AppleTalk/Macs.

+-----+
|     |   Alan Oppenheimer
|     |   Open Door Networks, Inc.
|o    |   Internet solutions as easy to use as the Macintosh itself
|     |   [email-masked]
|     |   http://www.opendoor.com
+-----+