Local area network share

[hilaire]

I am looking for advices on a feature I want to develop for Dr. Geo.

The need takes place in a LAN, for example in a School computer lab. A teacher and students each run their own instance of Dr. Geo. I want the teacher to be able to share with her students some sketches. Then the students,from their Dr. Geo running instance, can browse and open the sketches shared by the teacher.

The user scenario will be like this:

- Teacher copies the sketches she wants to share with her students in her DrGeo.app/MyShare folder. Then she activates the Dr. Geo share service (from the setting browser for example).

- Students start their own instances of Dr. Geo. It automatically scans (in the background preferably) the LAN for any available LAN shares. When a student goes to File>open she can also browse and open the discovered shares.

- Ideally students could also save their work on the teacher share.

The constraints: there is no such things as fixed IP. So the scan is over a subnetwork range.

Any advises, reference reading, traps to avoid?

[hilaire (hilaire-fernandes)]

If it is on a single network this should be doable by using UDP broadcast announcements. The share server can announce some information and its IP in a UDP packet being broadcasted. Every client receives that and then knows the address of the server to connect to

Hope this helps, Norbert