So I’ve read a few places that the protocol is backward compatible with D-Bus. Does that imply that the APIs could be merged into existing D-Bus libraries? Has anyone found good docs specifying what the differences are?

Hello – I just noticed the following statement in Chapter 3 of: “Introduction to the AllJoyn® Framework”:

  • The AllJoyn model re-implements the wire protocol set forth by the D-Bus specification and extends the D-Bus wire protocol to support distributed devices.

​I found that the “wire protocol” is the link level representation of the data, and seems to be well described in the D-Bus spec:

I also found that the Introspection description is in D-Bus Introspection (XML) Format.  Sadly, the Spec I found states: “A more formal DTD and spec needs writing, but here are some quick notes”.

Beyond those seemingly reasonable choices, it appears to me that there is little else in common.

Good Luck!

The wire protocol is D-Bus.

1. D-Bus does not provide discovery mechanisms across the local machine since it is more of an IPC mechanism on a local machine. 
2. D-Bus has no session management when the peers talk to each other. AllJoyn provides its own session management layer.
3. AllJoyn is transport agnostic. The developer does not have to bother if he is on a particular transport and then change his implementation accordingly
4. AllJoyn has its own security mechanisms and encryption layer since we have session management.
5. AllJoyn also has header compression capabilities.
6. An AllJoyn client can run on an embedded device and talk to a daemon residing on a remote machine. 

AllJoyn is not meant to be a replacement for D-Bus although an AllJoyn client can talk to D-Bus and vice versa which gives you a capability wherein you can talk to any D-Bus daemon using the client library (which is available in numerous language bindings).

Hope that gives you some clarity on what the differences between the two things are.

Regards,
Nikhil

Hi Nikhil,

Thank for your complete response about D-Bus and AllJoyn difference.

But I wount to ask where I can find most detailed documentation of AllJoyn framework.

Regards,

Andrea