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/Bonjous 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?

Answer 1

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