FNS and Application Development

Applications also need naming services and applications in the Solaris environment must often deal with a diversity of name service interfaces. An application might also be exposed to a variety of often incompatible naming systems external to the Solaris environment. Local- and wide-area networks connect a heterogeneous array of hardware and operating systems, increasing the variety of potential interfaces. Not only do these naming interfaces differ widely, but the essential naming operations are often obscure.

FNS simplifies these problems in two ways:

• It provides a single standard interface to the basic naming functions that developers can use for their applications.

• It permits changes or additions to network name services without changing existing applications.