Federated Naming Service Programming Guide

Preface

The Federated Naming Service (FNS) is a set of application programming interfaces and policies that allow applications to use a common set of names and policies over different name services.

FNS is implemented on top of NIS+ and allows you to use a set of common names with desktop applications. Sun's implementation of FNS conforms to the X/Open™ federated naming (XFN) specification.

Who Should Use This Book

The primary audience of Federated Naming Service Guide is software developers who write distributed applications. Use of this guide assumes basic competence in programming, a working familiarity with the C programming language, and a working familiarity with the UNIX® operating system. Developers should read all four parts of this manual.

System and network administrators should look at System Administration Guide: Naming and Directory Services (DNS, NIS, and LDAP) for FNS setup and configuration, as well as administration information. This manual does not cover NIS or the Domain Name System (DNS) except as they relate to FNS. For information on all other Solaris operating environment naming and directory services, please refer to the System Administration Guide: Naming and Directory Services (DNS, NIS, and LDAP).

How This Book Is Organized

Chapter 1, Introduction to the Federated Naming Service (FNS) is a high-level overview of FNS and the problems it addresses.

Chapter 2, Interfaces for Writing XFN Applications describes the client programming interfaces for X/Open Federated Naming (XFN).

Chapter 3, XFN Programming Examples presents three self-contained executable programs: a namespace browser, a printer client and server, and a tool to populate attributes of users.

Appendixes

Appendix A, XFN Composite Names describes the XFN composite name string syntax and the resolution techniques for composite names.

Appendix B, XFN Composite Names Syntax gives supplemental information about composite name syntax.

Related Books

With the exception of the XFN specification, the following books do not specifically cover FNS but they provide a good background on how name services work in client-server computing:

• Raman Khanna. Distributed Computing--Implementation and Strategy. Prentice Hall, 1993

• Sape J. Mullender (editor).Distributed Systems. ACM Press, 1990

• P. Albitz and C. Liu.DNS and BIND. O`Reilly, 1992

• Managing the X.500 Client Toolkit. SunSoft Inc., 1995

• X/Open Preliminary Specifications, Federated Naming: The XFN Specifications. X/Open Document #P403, ISBN: 1-85912-045-8. X/Open, July 1994

You may also want to reference the following AnswerBook® on-line documentation:

• Solaris Reference Manual Collection

• Solaris Software Developer Collection

• System Administration Guide: Basic Administration

• System Administration Guide: Advanced Administration

Accessing Sun Documentation Online

The docs.sun.com^SM Web site enables you to access Sun technical documentation online. You can browse the docs.sun.com archive or search for a specific book title or subject. The URL is http://docs.sun.com.

Typographic Conventions

The following table describes the typographic changes used in this book.

Table P-1 Typographic Conventions

Shell Prompts in Command Examples

The following table shows the default system prompt and superuser prompt for the C shell, Bourne shell, and Korn shell.

Table P-2 Shell Prompts