Babel Object Server

The next thing that a user needs is a BOS to connect to. The BOS is implemented by the protocol writers as a library. As mentioned before, the BOS may be run by itself by a small driver program, or run as part of a program that also acts as a client. There is an example of a small driver program in contrib/babel-rmi/orb.

The BOS is accessed by a protocol specific URL. A URL is a string the uniquely identifies a network resource. Most people are aware of Internet URLs like: http://www.llnl.gov/CASC/components/babel.html (which is the URL for the Babel web page). Babel RMI also uses URLs, but they are mostly protocol specific. Babel RMI only uses the portion of the URL up to the first non-alphanumeric character to identify the protocol that is being used. The rest of the URL is passed on to the protocol. This means that while ``Simple Protocol'' URLs look like this:

simhandle://pc3.nowhere.com:9999/

one can also imagine URLs of the form:

weird://05:16:5B:BD:E1:73/

for the weird protocol, or:

weird+SSL://05:16:5B:BD:E1:73/

for running the weird protocol over SSL. Babel RMI itself does not attempt to parse anything past the first non-alphanumeric character, so most of the URL is entirely protocol dependent.



babel-1.4.0
users_guide Last Modified 2008-10-16

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