What is an object reference?
An object reference is the distributed computing equivalent of a pointer
- CORBA defines the Interoperable Object Reference (IOR)
- IORs can be converted from raw reference to string form, and back
- Stringified IORs can be stored and retrieved by clients and servers using other ORBs
- an IOR contains a fixed object key, containing:
- the object’s fully qualified interface name (repository ID)
- user-defined data for the instance identifier
- An IOR can also contain transient information, such as:
- The host and port of its server
- metadata about the server’s ORB, for potential optimizations
- optional user defined data