The Community OpenORB Naming Services

The OpenORB Interoperable Naming Service (INS) is a fully compliant implementation of the Interoperable Naming Service specified by O.M.G. The persistence of this naming service is managed by the OpenORB Persistent State Service. That allows you to persist objects into a file or a database. The main purpose of the Naming Service is to organize CORBA Objects into a naming graph. Each object in the naming graph is called a name binding. A name binding is always defined relative to a naming context. A naming context is a node that contains a set of name bindings in which each name is unique.

To use the Transient Naming Service, you need the OpenORB kernel; to use the Interoperable Naming Service, you need the OpenORB kernel and the OpenORB Persistent State Service. You can find both modules at http://openorb.sourceforge.net in the Download section.

The Interoperable Naming Service distribution contains an Ant script. Several dependencies are required: The OpenORB kernel distribution , the Persistent State Service distribution and the Transaction Service distribution. You need to add to your classpath those distributions (this includes openorb-{version}.jar, openorb_tools-{version}.jar, openorb_pss-{version}.jar and openorb_ots-{version}.jar files). We advise you to use the build.bat (for windows) or build.sh (for unix).

Then, to compile the OpenORB Naming Service, enter the following command from the command line from the root directory NamingService that you got when downloading the service:

build or sh build.sh

The bin directory of the NamingService distribution contains launch scripts for both Unix and Windows. Here is the command line that will start the Interoperable Naming Service (use tns instead of ins for the Transient NamingService):

ins -ORBPort=port
      

When you start the OpenORB Naming Service, you can either

If you start the OpenORB Naming Service with a specific port number, you have to specify it in the initial reference of the NameService configuration in your OpenORB.xml file.

<property name="NameService"
    value="corbaloc://1.2@host:port/NameService" />
      

Each launch script supports a number of options. All available options can be displayed using the --help option. A few parameters of the ins will be explained in the next sections.

When using the ins you can persist your data by specifying the --persistenceType type option when launching the Naming Service. The default type is memory persistence, but you can specify file or database as well.

We remind you that such persistence is managed by the OpenORB Persistent State Service. That means you must have configured your OpenORB.xml file: you must have at least a module mamed "pss". For more information about the installation and configuration of the Persistent State Service, refer to the documentation that is delivered with the distribution of that service.

You may want to shutdown the Naming Service from a distant host or from an application.

The OpenORB Naming Service allows you to do that by specifying a --shutdownRoot flag when launching the Naming Service. Using this flag, if you invoke the destroy method on the root node (this is not permitted otherwise), you will shutdown the Naming Service.