Comments on draft-ryan-corba-schema-00.txt

[Jeffrey Spirn <jspirn@us.oracle.com>]

I have two suggestions:

1) The Corba Naming Service (CosNaming) defines "bindings" which are a
subset of the "corbaObject" LDAP schema element, with the following
exception:  CosNaming bindings include a binary flag ("binding type")
which indicates whether or not the binding is to a naming context
(naming contexts are analogous to the corbaContainer schema object)
intended for use in resolving path names. I believe such a "binding
type" flag should be added to the corbaObject schema object.  It can be
a an optional (MAY) attribute.

Why is this important?  Because it may be useful to migrate CosNaming
implementations into the directory, using the directory as a repository
for CosNaming objects, and creating a unified Corba/LDAP naming
service.  Access to these "bindings" in the directory could be either
via the CosNaming API, or via LDAP.  But the corbaObject element is
unsuitable as a representation of a CosNaming binding without the
binding-type flag.  Without the flag, there can be no standard way to
create a Corba Naming Service in a directory.

Note the the repository-ID attribute in the existing draft is *not*
sufficient to identify the binding type.  A binding to a
"IDL:omg.org/CosNaming/NamingContext:1.0" is not considered a "naming
context" binding (for purposes of resolving a Corba path name) unless it
has been bound with the bind_context (or similar) Corba operation. There
are also semantic issues wrt rebind/rebind_context which are discussed
in the newly approved Interoperable Naming Service specification
(ftp://ftp.omg.org/pub/docs/orbos/98-10-11.pdf). If the flag is omitted,
it will be very awkward to use this schema element as a vehicle for a
unified naming service.


2) The "corbaObject" schema element should be renamed
"corbaObjectReference", since it is really an IOR.  Just as serialized
Java objects will be stored in the directory under the proposal in
draft-ryan-java-schema-02.txt, we may eventually want to store Corba
Objects (not references) in the directory.  This could be done via the
new Objects-by-value specification, or by Corba Externalization.  I do
not propose adding such a feature to the present draft, but by changing
the name of the corbaObject element we make it easier to add the feature
in the future.

Regards,
Jeff Spirn
Oracle