This topic introduces the key concepts for understanding naming and directory as its pertains to this product.
Naming is used by clients of WebSphere Application Server applications to obtain references to objects related to those applications, such as Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) homes. These objects are bound into a mostly hierarchical structure, referred to as a name space. In this structure, all non-leaf objects are called contexts. For more details, see Naming.
The name space for the entire cell is federated among all servers in the cell. Every server process contains a name server. All name servers provide the same logical view of the cell name space. For more details, see Name space logical view.
To increase the performance of JNDI operations, the WebSphere Application Server JNDI implementation employs caching to reduce the number of remote calls to the name server for lookup operations. For most cases, use the default cache setting. For more details, see JNDI caching.
For information about the syntax used in the name space, see JNDI name syntax and INS name syntax.
WebSphere Application Server name servers are an implementation of the CORBA CosNaming interface. WebSphere Application Server provides a JNDI implementation which you can use to access CosNaming name servers through the JNDI interface. Issues can exist when mapping JNDI name strings to and from CORBA names. For more details, see JNDI to CORBA name mapping considerations.
Administrators can configure bindings into the name space. A configured binding is different from a programmatic binding in that the system creates the binding every time a server is started, even if the target context is in a transient partition. For more details, see Configured name bindings.
Federating name spaces involves binding contexts from one name space into another name space. For details, see Name space federation.
Administrators can add name bindings to the name space through the configuration.
Name servers add these configured bindings to the name space view by reading the configuration data for the bindings. Configuring bindings is an alternative to creating the bindings from a program. For more details, see Name space bindings.