Legacy Document
Important: The information in this document is obsolete and should not be used for new development.
Important: The information in this document is obsolete and should not be used for new development.
Making Your Application Available Throughout the Internet
This section discusses the Name-Binding Protocol (NBP) that you can use to make your application or process visible to users and other applications and processes throughout an AppleTalk internet.NBP binds the internet socket address assigned to a process or application to a special human-readable name that contains three parts: the object, type, and zone fields. The NBP name is different from the name of the application. The object and type are assigned by the process itself and can be anything the user or application developer selects; the zone is the one in which the node resides.
NBP maintains a table on each node that contains the name-and-address pair for each application or process on that node that is registered with NBP. Once an application or process is registered with NBP, it becomes visible to users and other applications and processes throughout the internet. When a process or application is registered with NBP, it is referred to as a network-visible entity.
Users can select an application by its NBP name. Based on the name or a part of the name, applications and processes can request NBP to look up the internet socket address for the entity.
When you use other AppleTalk protocols that send and receive data, your application or process becomes associated with an internet socket address. Although applications and processes need the internet socket addresses of other applications and processes that they want to connect with, a name identifying the type of application and its location is more meaningful to an end user. Your application or process can use NBP to find all other applications or processes of the same type and get their internet socket addresses. Your application could then display the NBP names of other applications to an end user so that the user can select an application to connect to. Your application could then use another AppleTalk protocol, such as ADSP, to connect to the partner application.
An application, such as a network management tool, could use NBP to collect information so that it can provide an inventory of all nodes belonging to a zone and list the applica-
tions running on each of those nodes. It could sort the applications by type. For example, it could provide a list of all file servers on an AppleTalk internet.