The zeroconf discovery agent is derived from Apple’s Bonjour Networking technology, which defines the zeroconf protocol as a mechanism for discovering services on a network. Fuse Message Broker bases its implementation of the zeroconf discovery agent on JmDSN, which is a service discovery protocol that is layered over IP/multicast and is compatible with Apple Bonjour.

The agent requires that each broker you want to advertise is configured to use a multicast discovery agent to publish its details to a multicast group. Clients using the zeroconf agent as part of the discovery URI they use for connecting to a broker will use the agent to receive the list of available brokers advertising in the specified multicast group.

	Important
	Your local network (LAN) must be configured to use IP/multicast for the zeroconf agent to work.

The zeroconf discovery agent URI conforms to the syntax in Example 2.10.

zeroconf://GroupID

For a broker to be discoverable using the zeroconf discovery agent, you must enable a multicast discovery agent in the broker's configuration. To enable the multicast discovery agent you set the transportConnector element's discoveryUri attribute to a mulitcast discovery agent URI as shown in Example 2.11.

<transportConnectors>
  <transportConnector name="openwire"
    uri="tcp://localhost:61716"
    discoveryUri="multicast://NEGroup" />
</transportConnectors>

The broker configured in Example 2.11 is discoverable as part of the multicast group NEGroup.

To use the agent a client must be configured to connect to a broker using a discovery protocol that uses a zeroconf agent URI as shown in Example 2.12.

discovery://(zeroconf://NEGroup)

A client using the URL in Example 2.12 will discover all the brokers advertised in the NEGroup multicast group and generate a list of brokers to which it can connect.