7.7. Naming

An operating system maintains a namespace for a single system. Examples of the objects it supports are processes, files and I/O streams. We saw in Chapter 2 that object-based systems are able to use a unified naming scheme for all objects and sketched how this could be defined for a single system. When we consider distributed systems we need to expand namespaces beyond those maintained by a single operating system.

Names are defined in a context. It may be that a distributed system design is based on a homogeneous operating system which supports a distributed object model. Alternatively, we may have to work in a heterogeneous world and devise a naming scheme for the distributed application we wish to build. For example, names may ...

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