absolute urls using zeroconf

[Gaspard Bucher]

Hi list !

While working on the oscit library I came upon a difficult problem:

How to specify absolute urls to an arbitrary remote location ?

There are four cases to this problem:

1. we can resolve IP for the remote host and we know the port number

oscit://example.org:7043/path/to/resource

2. we can resolve IP for the remote host but we do not know the port number

oscit://example.org/path/to/resource

===> oscit can use SRV records from example.org DNS

===> we have a problem if multiple oscit devices run on the same machine (see below)

3. we do not know the port and/or ip (local network)

"name of service entity"/path/to/resource

===> oscit will use zeroconf to find "name of service entity" responding to _oscit._udp protocol.

4. we can resolve IP for the remote host and want to specify entity name

oscit://example.org/"name of service entity"/path/to/resource

This means oscit would resolve the following url formats:

foo/bar (relative, same application)

/foo/bar (absolute, same application)

"some device"/foo/bar (service on local network)

oscit://example.org:7070/foo/bar (far remote, known port)

oscit://example.org/foo/bar (far remote, unknown port, using first service in SRV records)

oscit://example.org/"some device"/foo/bar (far remote, unknown port, using specific service from SRV records)

Please tell me if you feel there is something wrong with any of these urls...

Gaspard