CORBA35 — Proposal for extension to CosNaming

Since there doesn't appear to be a CosNaming mailing list this seems like as good a forum as any this discussion.

It has long struck me that the use of CosNaming for JNDI in J2EE applications creates a significant outage in being able to bind and retrieve objects that are not remote (see the EJB 2.0 spec for details). In JNDI you can bind pretty much anything that is Remote (aka an Object reference) or Serializable (aka a valuetype), however CosNaming only allows you to do the former.

One easy way to solve this would be to create a new NamingContext extension that allows one to bind and resolve Any's. This is in keeping with the Java-to-IDL spec's treatment of untyped Java objects and at the same time would not compromise non-java implementations. For JNDI it would only be necessary to support Any's containing:

1. Object references
2. valuetypes
3. valueboxes

An exception could be thrown for any other types. The candidate interface might look something like this:

module CosNaming {
interface NamingContextAny : NamingContextExt {
exception TypeNotSupported {};

void bind_any(in Name n, in any obj)
raises (NotFound, CannotProceed,
InvalidName, AlreadyBound, TypeNotSupported);

void rebind_any(in Name n, in any obj)
raises(NotFound, CannotProceed, InvalidName, TypeNotSupported);

any resolve_any (in Name n)
raises (NotFound, CannotProceed, InvalidName);

any resolve_str_any(in StringName n)
raises (NotFound, CannotProceed,
InvalidName, AlreadyBound);
};
};

The implementation of this interface in Java is trivial, although perhaps less so in other languages. Whether or not that matters is open to question.