Sams Teach Yourself J2EE™ in 21 Days, Second Edition

Naming and Directory Services

A Naming Service provides a mechanism for giving names to objects so you can retrieve and use those objects without knowing the location of the object. Objects can be located on any machine accessible from your network, not necessarily the local workstation.

A real-world example is a phone directory. It stores telephone numbers against names and addresses. To find people's phone numbers is simply a matter of using their name (and possibly address) to identify an entry in the phone book and obtaining the stored phone number. There are a few complications, such as finding the right phone book to look in, but it is essentially a simple process.

Incidentally, naming services have a similar problem to that of finding ...