ZeroMQ

Discovery

One of the great things about short-range wireless is the proximity. WiFi maps closely to the physical space, which maps closely to how we naturally organize. In fact, the Internet is quite abstract, and this confuses a lot of people who “kind of get it” but in fact don’t really. With WiFi, we have technical connectivity that is potentially super-tangible. You see what you get and you get what you see. Tangible means easy to understand, and that should mean love from users instead of the typical frustration and quiet seething hatred.

Proximity is the key. Say we have a bunch of WiFi radios in a room, happily beaconing to each other. For lots of applications it makes sense that they can find each other and start chatting, without any user input. After all, most real-world data isn’t private, it’s just highly localized.

As a first step toward ØMQ-based proximity networking, let’s look at how to do discovery. There exist libraries that do this. I don’t like them. They seem too complex and too specific and somehow to date from a prehistoric era before people realized that distributed computing could be fundamentally simple.