Chapter 8. Naming and Directory Services with JNDI
by Subramanian Kovilmadam
IN THIS CHAPTER
Walk into your local library and chances are you'll run into a card-based catalog system. This is a useful mechanism to look up the precise location of the book that you need, instead of browsing through the several racks of books without having a clue where to look. Modern libraries offer the same convenience by using a computer. The catalog provides us with several advantages. It makes accessing the book very easy, just by knowing the name of the book and/or the author. It also allows the library the flexibility to move the book from one rack to another with the guarantee that its customers can still find the book the next time they look for it—the library can simply update the new location information on the catalog card.
As a concept, the card-catalog system is still in use in our day-to-day life in the field of technology. There are catalog services available that let us look up objects or object references on the network—be it a LAN, a WAN, or the Internet—just by knowing their names. We look at a few types of such catalog systems—known as naming services—in the following sections.
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