Conclusions

WiFi is not Ethernet, and although I believe future ØMQ applications will have a very important decentralized wireless presence, it’s not going to be an easy road. Much of the basic reliability and capacity that you expect from Ethernet is missing. When you run a distributed application over WiFi you have to allow for frequent timeouts, random latencies, arbitrary disconnections, whole interfaces going down and coming up, and so on.

The technological evolution of wireless networking is best described as “slow and joyless.” Applications and frameworks that try to exploit decentralized wireless are mostly absent or poor. The only existing open source framework for proximity networking is AllJoyn from Qualcomm. But with ØMQ we proved that the inertia and decrepit incompetence of existing players was no reason for us to sit still. When we accurately understand problems, we can solve them. What we imagine, we can make real.

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