7.1 Overview

In a distributed environment, you need to address the problem of propagating references from server objects to clients. Throughout this book, we have given different solutions to this problem. The only portable and CORBA-compliant solution is to pass a stringified object reference, as described in Section 3.3.3. Note that the bind mechanism introduced in Section 3.3.3 is MICO specific and therefore not CORBA compliant.

The CORBA standard as issued by the OMG describes a naming service as part of the Common Object Services Specification (COSS). In order to understand this standard, we need to introduce a bit of terminology. As already pointed out in Section 3.3.3, a naming service maps names to addresses. This mapping is called a binding in CORBA. The addresses actually are object references or, to be more specific, instances of the IDL type Object.

A name always exists relative to a naming context. A naming context is itself an object that can be assigned a name. This way a hierarchical namespace can be constructed. In a mathematical sense, all bindings in a CORBA environment...