[Biocorba-l] Using the Naming Service as a top level object

[Brad Chapman]

Hello all;
While in class last week I got to thinking about how the current
BioCorba spec doesn't really have a high level interface, like the
BioEnv interface from BioCorba 0.2. Then I got to thinking about
using the standard Cos Naming Service to serve the same purpose.

Anyways, this weekend I hacked up a python implementation of my
ideas, and I really like what turned out so I thought I would bring
it up here. Basically, what I did is:

1. Set up a Naming Server (omniNames from omniORB) on one of my
computers.

2. Come up with a standard naming scheme for how to bind high-level
BioSequenceCollection items to the naming server.

3. Write a python implementation around this which makes it easy to
register, unregister and retrieve Database-like
BioSequenceCollection servers from the naming server.

Basically I just chose a simple naming scheme in which the
NamingContext "directory" for Database-like objects is:
(id = Database, kind = BioCorba)
and the individual databases are bound inside this with names:
(id = "The Database Name", kind = "Version")

This Naming Server based scheme works good for me because:

=> If you have a up-to-date Name Server implementation in your ORB
(which ORBit is not, unfortunately), then you can connect to the
Name Server just knowing a URL and port, which I think is more
natural to people than the CORBA IOR strings.

=> It is easy to bind/unbind objects, so it was easy for me to set
up my stuff to all be bound to a central server. I like this _a lot_
:-).

Anyways, I just wanted to report on what I've come across with this.
If people think this is a good idea, I'd like to maybe hash out a
simple naming scheme for storing top-level objects so that we could
use this approach from different languages. Also, we could
potentially install a Naming Server on the new Bio* hardware (with
Chris' permission, etc) which would give people learning
CORBA/BioCorba a ready made place to hold there objects. 

So, I like the Naming Service :-). Anyone else think this is a good
idea?

Brad
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