[33] OBJECT REFERENCES — DETAILS
(Part of the CORBA FAQ, Copyright © 1996-99)

[33.1] HOW ARE OBJECT REFERENCES OBTAINED BY APPLICATIONS?

Object references allow applications to issue distributed requests. How does an application acquire an object reference? CORBA provides a number of ways for this to occur. They basically fall into two categories, mechanisms to obtain initial object references and mechanisms to obtain subsequent object references. CORBA provides two standard ways to obtain an initial object reference:

• ORB::resolve_initial_references(string): CORBA defines a vendor specific mechanism for obtaining an initial set of object references. While CORBA defines the interface for the mechanism, internals required to drive the functionality are not standardized. CORBA specifies that an application can obtain an object reference by calling resolve_initial_references(), but vendor specific configurations files, command line arguments, of environmental variable might be required for the call to succeed. Object references obtained in this way can most likely be implemented only within the same vendors ORB.
• ORB::string_to_object(string): CORBA provides a vendor independent mechanism for obtaining an object reference. The string_to_object() operation returns an object reference directly from a particular string. The object reference is actually an interoperable object reference and thus can be implemented within an ORB supporting IIOP. Strings are basically encoded identifiers and are not human readable. The string can be hard coded into an application, stored and retrieved from a file, or obtained through some other IPC mechanism. Strings are initially created by calling object_to_string() on an actual object reference.

Once an application obtains an object reference, it can obtain subsequent objects by calling any remote operations on the original object reference that happen to return a CORBA object. CORBA refers to an object capable of returning an object reference as a factory. CORBA defines two services that are basically mechanisms by which subsequent object references can be obtained. These are listed below:

• CORBA NameService
• CORBA TraderService

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